Freud
ORG
and
PhilosophyPaul
ORG
RicoeurD.
SavageDigital
ORG
Ricoeur Not for distribution.
Freud
FAC
and Philosophy:
NORP
An Essay
PERSON
on Interpretation. Translation by
D.
NORP
SAVAGE.
New Haven
GPE
London
GPE
:
Yale University Press
ORG
,
1970
DATE
,
NORP
(bound),
ORG
1970
DATE
(paper), x-573 p.
First
ORDINAL
published in
French
LANGUAGE
in
1965
DATE
.
GPE
done
GPE
FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY
WORK_OF_ART
An
Essay
PERSON
on Interpretation
by
Paul Ricoeur
PERSON
translated by
Denis Savage
PERSON
New Haven
GPE
and
London
GPE
,
Yale University Press
ORG
,
1970
DATE
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press),
without written permission from the publishers.
Library of
Congress
ORG
catalog card number:
70-89907
CARDINAL
Designed by
Sally Sullivan
PERSON
, set in
Times Roman
NORP
type,
and printed in
the United States of America
GPE
by
Vail-Ballou Press, Inc.
ORG
,
Binghamton
GPE
,
N.Y.
GPE
Distributed in
Great Britain
GPE
,
Europe
LOC
,
Asia
LOC
, and
Africa
LOC
by
Yale University Press Ltd.
ORG
,
London
GPE
; in
Canada
GPE
by
McGill-Queen’s University Press
ORG
,
Montreal
GPE
; and in
Mexico
GPE
by
Centro Interamericano de Libros Academicos
ORG
,
Mexico City
GPE
.
ORG
Odense
Universitetsbibliotek
PERSON
7o
CARDINAL
- )r •;
The Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion
ORG
in
the Light of Science and Philosophy
ORG
The deed of gift declares that “the object of this foundation is not the
promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the
assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be
hereafter discovered, and its application to human welfare, especially
by the building of the truths of science and philosophy into the
structure of a broadened and purified religion. The founder believes
that such a religion will greatly stimulate intelligent effort for the
improvement of human conditions and the advancement of the race in
strength and excellence of character. To this end it is desired that a
series of lectures be given by men eminent in their respective
departments, on ethics, the history of civilization and religion,
biblical research, all sciences and branches of knowledge which have an
important bearing on the subject, all the great laws of nature,
especially of evolution . . . also such interpretations of literature
and sociology'as are in accord with the spirit of this foundation, to
the end that the
Christian
NORP
spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the world’s knowledge
and that mankind may be helped to attain its highest possible welfare
and happiness upon this
earth
LOC
.” The present work constitutes the
thirty-eighth
CARDINAL
volume published on this foundation.
CONTENTS
PRODUCT
Preface xi
Translator’s Note xv
Book I: Problematic:
The Placing of Freud
1.
ORG
Language, Symbol, and Interpretation 3
Psychoanalysis
GPE
and
Language
GPE
,
3
CARDINAL
;
Symbol
ORG
and
Interpretation
ORG
,
6
DATE
;
Toward
PERSON
a
Critique of Symbol
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
2
CARDINAL
.
The Conflict of Interpretations 20
The Concept of Interpretation
ORG
,
20
DATE
;
Interpretation as Recollection of Meaning
ORG
,
28
DATE
; Interpretation as Exercise of Suspicion,
32
3
DATE
.
Hermeneutic Method
PERSON
and Reflective
Philosophy 37
The Recourse of Symbols to Reflection
WORK_OF_ART
,
37
DATE
;
The Recourse of Reflection to Symbols
ORG
,
42
DATE
;
Reflection
ORG
and Equivocal Language,
47
DATE
;
Reflection
ORG
and
the Hermeneutic Conflict
PERSON
,
54
DATE
Book II
WORK_OF_ART
: Analytic: Reading of
Freud
Introduction
ORG
: How to Read Freud 59
PART i: ENERGETICS AND HERMENEUTICS
The Epistemological Problem in
Freudianism
GPE
65
1
PRODUCT
. An Energetics Without Hermeneutics
69
CARDINAL
The Constancy Principle and
the Quantitative Apparatus
ORG
,
71
DATE
;
Toward the Topography
PERSON
,
82
2
DATE
. Energetics and Hermeneutics in
The Interpretation of Dreams 87
The Dream-Work and the Work of Exegesis
WORK_OF_ART
,
88
DATE
;
The “Psychology” of Chapter 7,
WORK_OF_ART
102
CARDINAL
3
CARDINAL
. Instinct and
Idea
PERSON
in
the “Papers on
Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
” 115
The Attainment of the Topographic-Economic View vii
and of
the Concept of Instinct
ORG
,
117
CARDINAL
; Representatives and Ideas,
134
CARDINAL
PART II:
THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
WORK_OF_ART
1
CARDINAL
.
The Analogy of Dreams
ORG
159
The Privileged Place of Dreams,
159
CARDINAL
;
The Analogy of
the Work of Art
ORG
,
163
CARDINAL
2
CARDINAL
. From the
Oneiric
ORG
to the Sublime 178
The
Clinical
ORG
and Descriptive Approaches to Interpretation,
180
CARDINAL
;
The Genetic Ways of Interpretation
ORG
,
186
CARDINAL
;
The Metapsychological Problem: The Notion of the
Superego
ORG
,
211
CARDINAL
3
CARDINAL
. Illusion 230
Illusion and the Strategy of Desire,
231
CARDINAL
;
The Genetic Stage of Explanation: Totemism
ORG
and Monotheism,
236
CARDINAL
;
The Economic Function of Religion
ORG
,
247
CARDINAL
PART in:
EROS
ORDINAL
, THANTOS, ANANKE
1
CARDINAL
.
The Pleasure Principle
ORG
and
the Reality
Principle 261
WORK_OF_ART
The Reality Principle
WORK_OF_ART
and the Secondary
Process
PRODUCT
,
263
CARDINAL
;
DATE
The Reality Principle
WORK_OF_ART
and “Object-Choice,"
270
CARDINAL
;
The Reality Principle and the Economic Task of the Ego,
276
2
WORK_OF_ART
.
The Death Instincts: Speculation
ORG
and
Interpretation 281
Freudian Speculation on
Life and Death
WORK_OF_ART
,
281
CARDINAL
; The Death Instinct and
the Destructiveness of the Superego
ORG
,
293
CARDINAL
; Culture As Situated Between Eros and
Thanatos
ORG
,
302
CARDINAL
3
CARDINAL
. Interrogations
310
CARDINAL
What is Negativity?,
311
CARDINAL
;
Pleasure and Satisfaction
ORG
,
318
CARDINAL
; What is
Reality
ORG
?,
324
Book III
PRODUCT
:
Dialectic
NORP
: A Philosophical Interpretation
of
Freud
1.
ORG
Epistemology:
Between Psychology and
Phenomenology
WORK_OF_ART
344
The Epistemological Case against
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,
345
CARDINAL
;
Psychoanalysis
PRODUCT
is not an
Observational Science
WORK_OF_ART
,
358
CARDINAL
;
The Phenomenological Approach
GPE
to the Psychoanalytic Field,
375
CARDINAL
;
Psychoanalysis
FAC
is not Phenomenology,
390
CARDINAL
CONTENTS
2
DATE
. Reflection: An Archeology of the
Subject
ORG
419
PRODUCT
Freud
PRODUCT
and
the Question of the Subject
ORG
,
420
CARDINAL
;
Reality
ORG
of the Id,
Ideality of Meaning
ORG
,
430
CARDINAL
;
The Concept of Archeology
ORG
,
439
CARDINAL
;
Archeology and Reflective Philosophy
ORG
,
452 /
3
EVENT
.
Dialectic
NORP
: Archeology and Teleology
459
CARDINAL
A Teleological Model of Consciousness; The Hegelian Phenomenology,
462
CARDINAL
; The Unsurpassable Character of
Life and Desire
ORG
,
468
CARDINAL
;
The Implicit Teleology of Freudianism
ORG
:
The Operative Concepts
ORG
,
472
CARDINAL
; The
Implicit
NORP
Teleology of Freudianism:
Identification
NORP
,
477
CARDINAL
;
The
Implicit
NORP
Teleology of Freudianism:
The Question of Sublimation
ORG
,
483
CARDINAL
4
CARDINAL
. Hermeneutics: The Approaches to Symbol
494
CARDINAL
The Overdetermination of Symbols
ORG
,
496
CARDINAL
;
The Hierarchical Order of Symbol
ORG
,
506
CARDINAL
;
A Dialectical Reexamination
ORG
of
the Problem of Sublimation
ORG
and
the Cultural Object
ORG
,
514
CARDINAL
;
Faith and Religion
ORG
;
The Ambiguity of
the Sacred
WORK_OF_ART
,
524
CARDINAL
; The Value and Limits of a
Psychoanalysis of Religion
ORG
,
531
CARDINAL
Index
This book originates in the
Terry Lectures
PERSON
given at
Yale University
ORG
in
the autumn of 1961
DATE
. I wish to express my deep thanks to
the Lecture Committee
ORG
,
the Philosophy Department
ORG
, the Director of
the Yale University Press
ORG
, and the President of
Yale University
ORG
for the invitation to undertake this work.
In
the autumn of 1962
DATE
,
eight
CARDINAL
lectures given in the Cardinal Mercier Chair at
the University of Louvain
ORG
became the next stage of the work. I wish to thank the President of the
Institut superieur de
ORG
philosophic and the colleagues who welcomed me in this chair for their
criticism as well as for the indulgence they showed toward an enterprise
in progress.
I now owe it to the reader to give some indication of what he may and what he may not expect from this book.
In the
first
ORDINAL
place, this book deals with
Freud
ORG
and not with psychoanalysis. This means there are
two
CARDINAL
things lacking: analytic experience itself and a consideration of the post-
Freudian
NORP
schools. As for the
first
ORDINAL
point, it is taking a gamble, no doubt, to write about
Freud
ORG
without being an analyst or having been analyzed and to treat his work
as a monument of our culture, as a text in which our culture is
expressed and understood. The reader will have to judge whether the
wager has been won or lost. As for the post-
Freudian
NORP
literature, I have deliberately set it aside, either because it stems from corrections brought to
Freud
ORG
’s ideas from analytic experience that I do not have, or because it
introduces new theoretical conceptions the discussion of which would
have led me away from a rigorous debate with the true founder of
psychoanalysis. Therefore I have treated
Freud
ORG
’s work as a work unto itself, and have avoided discussing the conceptions of dissidents turned adversaries:
Adler
GPE
and
Jung
GPE
, or of students turned dissidents:
Erich Fromm
PERSON
,
Karen Horney
PERSON
,
Harry Stack Sullivan
PERSON
, or of disciples turned creators:
Melanie Klein
PERSON
,
Jacques Lacan
PERSON
.
Secondly
ORDINAL
, this book is
one
CARDINAL
not of psychology but of philosophy. My interest centers on the new understanding of man that
Freud
ORG
introduces. I place myself in the company of
Roland Dalbiez
PERSON
, my
first
ORDINAL
professor of philosophy, to whom I here wish to render homage, and of
Herbert Marcuse
PERSON
,
Philip Rieff
PERSON
, and
J. C. Flugel
PERSON
.
My work differs from that of
Roland Dalbiez
PERSON
on an essential point: I do not believe that
Freud
ORG
may be confined to the exploration of the less human elements in man.
My enterprise stems from the opposite conviction: Psychoanalysis
conflicts with every other global interpretation of the phenomenon of
man because it is an interpretation of culture. On this point I am in
agreement with the last
three
CARDINAL
authors cited. I differ from them, however, by the nature of my
philosophical preoccupation: my problem concerns the texture or
structure of
Freudian
NORP
discourse.
First
ORDINAL
, it is an epistemological problem: What is interpretation in
psychoanalysis, and how is the interpretation of the signs of man
interrelated with the economic explanation that claims to get at the
root of desire?
Second
ORDINAL
, it is a problem of reflective philosophy: What new self-understanding
comes out of this interpretation, and what self is it which thus comes
to self-understanding?
Third
ORDINAL
, it is a dialectical problem: Does
Freud
PERSON
’s interpretation of culture exclude all others? If not, what is the
rule of thought by which it can be coordinated with other
interpretations without falling into eclecticism? These
three
CARDINAL
questions mark the circuitous route by which I take up the problem left
unresolved at the end of my Symbolism of Evil, namely the relationship
between a hermeneutics of symbols and a philosophy of concrete
reflection.
The execution of this program required that Book II,
the “Reading of Freud,”
LAW
conducted as rigorously as possible, be kept separate
1
DATE
.
Roland Dalbiez
PERSON
,
La Methode
PERSON
psychanalytique et la doctrine freudienne (
2
CARDINAL
vols.
Paris
GPE
,
Desclee de Brouwer
PERSON
,
1936
DATE
). “
Freud
ORG
’s work is the most profound analysis history has ever known of the less human elements in man” (
2
DATE
,
513
CARDINAL
).
2
CARDINAL
.
Herbert Marcuse
PERSON
,
Eros and Civilization:
ORG
A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston
ORG
,
Beacon Press
ORG
,
1955
DATE
).
3
CARDINAL
.
Philip Rieff
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
, the Mind of the Moralist (
New York
GPE
,
Viking Press
ORG
,
1959
DATE
).
4
CARDINAL
.
J. C. Flugel
PERSON
,
Man, Morals and Society
WORK_OF_ART
(
New York
GPE
,
International Universities Press
ORG
,
1945
DATE
);
Peregrine Books
ORG
,
1962
DATE
.
PREFACE
from Book III,
the “Philosophical Interpretation”
LAW
which I propose. Thus the reader may treat
the “Analytic” of Book II
LAW
as a separate and self-sufficient work. In it I have tried to remain close to the
Freudian
NORP
text itself; to this end I have retranslated almost all the passages I
cite. The philosophical interpretation is placed before and after
my “Reading of Freud
LAW
,” being divided into the questions that make up
the “Problematic” of Book I and the attempts at
EVENT
solution that form
the “Dialectic” of Book III
LAW
.
5
CARDINAL
. In spite of the cumbersomeness of the procedure, I have decided to cite (a) the
German
NORP
text in
the Gesammelte Werke
FAC
(
18
CARDINAL
vols.
London
GPE
, from
1940
DATE
; abbreviation:
GW
ORG
) because it is the original text; (b)
the Standard Edition
ORG
(
24
CARDINAL
vols.
London
GPE
, from
1953
DATE
; abbreviation: SE) because it is the only critical edition; (c) the available
French
NORP
translations, so that
French
NORP
readers can locate the citations in their context and discuss the
respective translations. [Translator’s note: By the author’s directive,
all quotations from
Freud
ORG
’s texts will be taken from
the Standard Edition
ORG
; references to the
French
NORP
editions will be omitted, as being of little use to the
English
LANGUAGE
reader.]
6
CARDINAL
. The
four
CARDINAL
problems mentioned above constitute the
four
CARDINAL
levels of this “
Dialectic
NORP
.”
TRANSLATOR
ORG
’S NOTE
This translation began when my wife,
Rosa
PERSON
, and I
first
ORDINAL
translated the
three
CARDINAL
lectures which
Paul Ricoeur
PERSON
presented as the
Terry Lectures
PERSON
. We both feel very grateful to
M. Ricoeur
PERSON
for his friendship and for opening up to us the richness of his meditations on
Freud
ORG
, symbolism, and interpretation.
I have tried to make the translation conform as closely as possible to the
French
NORP
text. Several minor corrections were made of the original text, all of them after consultation with the author.
I wish to thank
Mary Parr
PERSON
for reading several chapters for style, and especially
Paul Lee
PERSON
of
the University of California
ORG
,
Santa Cruz
GPE
, for his painstaking reading of the entire manuscript and for his many helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank
the Department of Philosophy of Marquette University
ORG
for their secretarial help in typing the manuscript.
Denis Savage
Milwaukee
GPE
,
Wisconsin
GPE
November 1969
DATE
Problematic
NORP
:
The Placing of Freud
Chapter 1: Language, Symbol
ORG
, and Interpretation
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LANGUAGE
This book is a discussion or debate with
Freud
ORG
. Why this interest in psychoanalysis, an interest justified neither by
the competence of an analyst nor by the experience of having been
analyzed? The purpose of a book is never entirely justified. In any
event, no one is required to display his motives or to entangle himself
in a confession. To attempt it would be selfdelusion. Yet, more than
anyone, the philosopher cannot refuse to give his reasons. I will do so
by placing my investigation within a wider field of questioning and by
relating my particular interest to a common way of posing certain
problems.
It seems to me there is an area
today
DATE
where all philosophical investigations cut across
one
CARDINAL
another—the area of language. Language is the common meeting ground of
Wittgenstein
PERSON
’s investigations, the
English
LANGUAGE
linguistic philosophy, the phenomenology that stems from
Husserl
GPE
,
Heidegger
PERSON
’s investigations, the works of the
Bultmannian
NORP
school and of the other schools of
New Testament
GPE
exegesis, the works of comparative history of religion and of
anthropology concerning myth, ritual, and belief—and finally,
psychoanalysis.
Today
DATE
we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language to account
for the multiple functions of the human act of signifying and for their
interrelationships. How can language be put to such diverse uses as
mathematics and myth, physics and art? It is no accident that we ask
ourselves this question
today
DATE
. We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the
first
ORDINAL
time, we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of
human
discourse. The very progress of the aforementioned disparate
disciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismemberment of that
discourse.
Today
DATE
the unity of human language poses a problem.
Such is the broad
horizon within which our investigation is set. The present study in no
way pretends to offer the comprehensive philosophy of language we are
waiting for. I doubt moreover that such a philosophy could be elaborated
by any
one
CARDINAL
man. A modern
Leibniz
GPE
with the ambition and capacity to achieve it would have to be an
accomplished mathematician, a universal exegete, a critic versed in
several of the arts, and a good psychoanalyst. While awaiting that
philosopher of integral language, perhaps it is possible for us to
explore some of the key connections between the disciplines concerned
with language. The present essay is an attempt to contribute to that
investigation.
I contend that the psychoanalyst is a leading
participant in any general discussion about language. To start with,
psychoanalysis belongs to our time by virtue of
Freud
ORG
’s written work; through this medium psychoanalysis addresses itself to
those who are not analysts and who have not been analyzed. I am well
aware that without actual practice a reading of
Freud
ORG
is truncated and runs the risk of embracing only a fetish. But if the
textual approach to psychoanalysis has limits which practice alone can
remove, still it has the advantage of focusing attention upon an entire
aspect of
Freud
ORG
’s work that may be hidden by practice or overlooked by a science whose
sole concern is to account for what goes on in the analytic
relationship. A meditation on
Freud
ORG
’s work has the advantage of revealing that work’s broadest aim: not
only the renovation of psychiatry, but a reinterpretation of all
psychical productions pertaining to culture, from dreams, through art
and morality, to religion. This is how psychoanalysis belongs to modern
culture. By interpreting culture it modifies it; by giving it an
instrument of reflection it stamps it with a lasting mark.
The fluctuation in
Freud
ORG
’s writings between medical investigation and a theory of culture bears witness to the scope of the
Freudian
NORP
project. True, the major texts on culture are to be found
in the last part of
Freud
ORG
’s work. However, psychoanalysis should not be regarded as a form of
individual psychology, tardily transposed into a sociology of culture. A
summary glance at the
Freudian
NORP
bibliography shows that the
first
ORDINAL
texts on art, morality, and religion follow shortly upon
The Interpretation of Dreams2
WORK_OF_ART
and are then developed alongside the great doctrinal texts that constitute
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
” (
1913-17
DATE
), Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
(
1920
DATE
), and The Ego and the Id (
1923
DATE
). In fact, to grasp how the theory of culture is related to the theory
of dreams and the neuroses, it is necessary to go back to
The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900
WORK_OF_ART
, for it is here that the connection with mythology and literature was
first
ORDINAL
established. Ever since
1900
DATE
the Traum-deutung had proposed that dreams are the dreamer’s private
mythology and myths the waking dreams of peoples, that Sophocles’
Oedipus and
Shakespeare
PERSON
’s
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
are to be interpreted in the same way as dreams. We shall see that this proposal presents a problem.
Whatever
the outcome of this difficulty, the entrance of psychoanalysis into the
general contemporary discussion about language is not due solely to its
interpretation of culture. By making dreams not only the
first
ORDINAL
object of his investigation but a model (in what sense we will discuss below) of all the disguised, substitutive, and
Active
ORG
expressions of human wishing or desire,
Freud
ORG
invites us to look to dreams themselves for the various relations between desire and language.
First
ORDINAL
, it is not the dream as dreamed that can be interpreted, but rather the
text of the dream account; analysis attempts to substitute for this
text another text that could be called
1
DATE
.
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
was published in
1927
DATE
, Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
in
1930
DATE
,
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism in
1937—39
DATE
.
2
CARDINAL
. Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious
ORG
was published in
1905
DATE
,
“Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices
ORG
” in
1907
DATE
, Delusions and Dreams in
Jensen
PERSON
’s “Gradiva” in
1907
DATE
, the short essay
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
ORG
in
1908
DATE
,
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of His
Childhood
PERSON
in
1910
DATE
, and the very important
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
in
1913
DATE
.
3
CARDINAL
. “The Moses of Michelangelo” appeared in
1914
DATE
, “
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
WORK_OF_ART
” in
1915
DATE
, “
A Childhood Recollection
WORK_OF_ART
from
Dichtung
PERSON
und Wahrheit” in
1917
DATE
, “The ‘Uncanny’” in
1919
DATE
,
Group Psychology
ORG
and the Analysis of the Ego in
1921
DATE
.
the primitive speech of desire. Thus analysis moves from
one
CARDINAL
meaning to another meaning; it is not desires as such that are placed
at the center of the analysis, but rather their language. Later we will
discuss how this semantics of desire relates to the dynamics expressed
in the notions of discharge, repression, cathexis, etc. But it is
important to stress from the start that this dynamics—or energetics, or
even hydraulics—is articulated only in a semantics: the “vicissitudes of
instincts,” to use
one
CARDINAL
of
Freud
ORG
’s expressions, can be attained only in the vicissitudes of meaning.
Therein lies the deep reason for all the analogies between dreams and
wit, dreams and myth, dreams and works of art, dreams and religious
“illusion,” etc. All these “psychical productions” belong to the area of
meaning and come under a unified question: How do desires achieve
speech? How do desires make speech fail, and why do they themselves fail
to speak? This new approach to the whole of human speech, to the
meaning of human desire, is what entitles psychoanalysis to its place in
the general debate on language.
SYMBOL AND INTERPRETATION
Is
it possible to locate more exactly just where psychoanalysis enters
this general debate? Having found the origin of the problem in the theme
of
Freud
ORG
’s
first
ORDINAL
great book, let us also look there for a
first
ORDINAL
indication of the program of psychoanalysis. We are not yet ready to enter into the book itself, but at least the title
Traumdeutung
GPE
may serve as a guide. In this composite word we are confronted with the
question of dreams and the question of interpretation. Let us take the
two
CARDINAL
paths of the title and follow each in turn. The interpretation is
concerned with dreams: the word “dream” is not a word that closes, but a
word that opens. It does not close in upon a marginal phenomenon of our
psychological life, upon the fantasies of our nights, the oneiric. It
opens out onto all psychical productions, those of insanity and those of
culture, insofar as they are the analogues of dreams, whatever may be
the degree and principle of that relationship. Along with dreams is
posited what I called above the semantics of desire, a semantics
that
centers around a somewhat nuclear theme: as a man of desires I go forth
in disguise—larvatus prodeo. By the same token language itself is from
the outset and for the most part distorted: it means something other
than what it says, it has a double meaning, it is equivocal. The dream
and its analogues are thus set within a region of language that presents
itself as the locus of complex significations where another meaning is
both given and hidden in an immediate meaning. Let us call this region
of double meaning “symbol,” and reserve discussion of the equivalence
for later.
The problem of double meaning is not peculiar to
psychoanalysis. It is also known to the phenomenology of religion in its
constant encounter with those great cosmic symbols of
earth
LOC
, heaven, water, life, trees, and stones, and with those strange
narratives about the origin and end of things which are the myths.
However, insofar as this discipline is phenomenology and not
psychoanalysis, the myths, rituals, and beliefs it studies are not
fables but a particular way in which man places himself in relation to
fundamental reality, whatever it may be. The problem dealt with by the
phenomenology of religion is not primarily the dissimulation of desire
in double meaning; this discipline does not begin by regarding symbols
as a distortion of language. For the phenomenology of religion, symbols
are the manifestation in the sensible—in imagination, gestures, and
feelings—of a further reality, the expression of a depth which both
shows and hides itself. What psychoanalysis encounters primarily as the
distortion of elementary meanings connected with wishes or desires, the
phenomenology of religion encounters primarily as the manifestation of a
depth or, to use the word immediately, leaving for later a discussion
of its content and validity, the revelation of the sacred.
Within
the general discussion of language a limited but important debate
immediately arises—limited, certainly, because it does not raise the
question of the status of univocal languages, but important, since it
covers the totality of double-meaning expressions. At the same time the
form of the debate is set and the key question proposed: Is the
showing-hiding of double meaning always a dissimulation of what desire
means, or can it sometimes be a manifes-
tation, a revelation,
of the sacred? And is this alternative itself real or illusory,
provisional or definitive? This question runs throughout this book.
Before
elaborating in the next chapter the terms of the debate and before
sketching the method of its resolution, let us continue to explore the
outlines of the problem.
Let us return to the title of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
and follow the other path of this great title. The term
Deutung
PERSON
does not mean science in a general way; it means interpretation in a
precise way. The word is chosen by design, and its juxtaposition with
the theme of dreams is itself quite meaningful. If dreams designate—pars
pro toto—the entire region of double-meaning expressions, the problem
of interpretation in turn designates all understanding specifically
concerned with the meaning of equivocal expressions. To interpret is to
understand a double meaning.
In this way the place of
psychoanalysis within the total sphere of language is specified: it is
the area of symbols or double meanings and the area in which the various
manners of interpretation confront one another. From now on we shall
call this special area, broader than psychoanalysis but narrower than
the theory of language as a whole which is its horizon, the “hermeneutic
field.” By hermeneutics we shall always understand the theory of the
rules that preside over an exegesis—that is, over the interpretation of a
particular text, or of a group of signs that may be viewed as a text.
(We shall explain later what we mean by the notion of text and by the
extension of the concept of exegesis to all signs bearing an analogy to a
text.)
If then double-meaning expressions constitute the
privileged theme of the hermeneutic field, it is at once clear that the
problem of symbolism enters a philosophy of language by the intermediary
of the act of interpretation.
But this initial decision to
interrelate the problem of symbolism and the problem of interpretation
raises a series of critical questions which I wish to pose at the
beginning of this book. These questions will not be resolved in this
chapter but will remain open to the end. It is precisely this mutual
relationship that makes the hermeneutic
problem a unique one; at
the same time it is decisive for the definitions of symbol and
interpretation. And these are anything but self-evident. The extreme
confusion of vocabulary in these matters calls for a decision, for
taking a position and sticking to it; and this decision entails a whole
philosophy which must be brought into the open. I have decided to
define, i.e. limit, the notions of symbol and interpretation through one
another. Thus a symbol is a doublemeaning linguistic expression that
requires an interpretation, and interpretation is a work of
understanding that aims at deciphering symbols. The critical discussion
will be concerned with the legitimacy of seeking the semantic criterion
of symbolism in the intentional structure of double meaning, and with
the legitimacy of taking this structure as the privileged object of
interpretation. This is what is at stake in my decision to mutually
delimit the fields of symbolism and interpretation.
In the semantic discussion to follow I shall bracket the conflict that, at least on a
first
ORDINAL
reading, opposes psychoanalytic interpretation, as well as any
interpretation conceived as the unmasking, demystification, or reduction
of illusions, to interpretation conceived as the recollection or
restoration of meaning. I am interested here merely in recognizing the
contours of the hermeneutic field, although a discussion that falls
short of the above conflict undoubtedly remains formal and abstract. It
is important at
first
ORDINAL
not to dramatize the debate but rather to contain it within the strict
limits of a semantic analysis that ignores the opposition between
distortion and revelation.
TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF SYMBOL
Let
us take up the question on the side of symbolism. Certain widespread
uses of the word are totally incompatible with one another and call for a
reasoned decision. The definition I propose lies between
two
CARDINAL
other definitions,
one
CARDINAL
too broad, the other too narrow, which we shall proceed to discuss.
Moreover, it is completely distinct from the conception of symbol in
symbolic logic; we shall be able to account for this
third
ORDINAL
differ-
BOOK 1. PROBLEMATIC
ence only after we have
elaborated the problem of hermeneutics and have located this problem
within a wider philosophical perspective.
Too broad a definition
is one that makes the “symbolic function” the general function of
mediation by which the mind or consciousness constructs all its
universes of perception and discourse; this definition, as is known, is
the one given by
Ernst Cassirer
PERSON
in his
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
WORK_OF_ART
. We should not forget that the explicit aim of
Cassirer
ORG
, inspired by
Kant
PERSON
’s philosophy, was to break the too narrow framework of the
transcendental method confined within the critique of the principles of
Newtonian
NORP
philosophy and to explore all the activities of synthesis and their
corresponding realms of objectivization. But is it legitimate to use the
term “symbolic” for those various “forms” of synthesis in which objects
are ruled by functions, for those “forces” each of which produces and
posits a world?
Let us do justice to Cassirer: he was the
first
ORDINAL
to have posed the problem of the reconstruction of language. The notion
of symbolic form, prior to constituting an answer, delimits a question,
namely, the question of the composition of the “mediating functions”
within a single function, which Cassirer calls das
Symbolische
ORG
. “The symbolic” designates the common denominator of all the ways of objec-tivizing, of giving meaning to reality.
But why call this function symbolic? Cassirer chose the term
first
ORDINAL
of all in order to express the universality of
the Copernican revolution
EVENT
, which substituted the question of objectivization by the mind’s
synthetic function for the question of reality as it is in itself. The
symbolic is the universal mediation of the mind between ourselves and
the real; the symbolic, above all, indicates the nonimmediacy of our
apprehension of reality. The use of the term in mathematics,
linguistics, and the history of religion seems to confirm that
“symbolic” has this species of universality.
Furthermore, the
word “symbol” seems well suited to designate the cultural instruments of
our apprehension of reality: language, religion, art, science. The task
of a philosophy of symbolic forms is to arbitrate the claims of
absoluteness of each of these symbolic
4
DATE
. See below,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
3
CARDINAL
.
functions and the many antinomies of the concept of culture that result from those claims.
Finally,
the word “symbol” expresses the mutation undergone by a theory of
categories—space, time, cause, number, etc.—when it escapes the limits
of a mere epistemology and moves from a critique of reason to a critique
of culture.
I do not deny the advantages of this choice, still less the legitimacy of
Cassirer
ORG
’s problem, although the
Kantian
NORP
transcendentalism which continues to govern the notions of
objectivization, synthesis, and reality is prejudicial, in my opinion,
to the work of description and classification of the symbolic forms. We
mentioned the unique problem that
Cassirer
ORG
denotes by the term “symbolic” from the beginning: the problem of the
unity of language and the interrelationship of its multiple functions
within a single empire of discourse. But this problem seems to me better
characterized by the notion of sign or signifying function. How man
gives meaning by filling a sensory content with meaning—that is the
problem
Cassirer
ORG
deals with.
Is this a dispute over words? I do not think so.
What is at stake in this terminological discussion is the specificity of
the hermeneutic problem. By unifying all the functions of mediation
under the title of “the symbolic,” Cassirer makes this concept equally
as broad as the concepts of reality and culture. Thus a fundamental
distinction is wiped out, which constitutes, as I see it, a true
dividing line: the distinction between univocal and plurivocal
expressions. It is this distinction that creates the hermeneutic
problem. Moreover,
Anglo
NORP
-Saxon linguistic philosophy will see to it that we are mindful of this
division of the semantic field. If we use the term symbolic for the
signifying function in its entirety, we no longer have a word to
designate the group of signs whose intentional texture calls for a read-
5
DATE
. As
Cassirer
ORG
himself says, the concept of symbol is meant to “encompass the totality
of those phenomena in which the sensuous is in any way filled with
meaning [
Sinnerftillung
ORG
im
Sinnlichen
GPE
], in which a sensuous content, while preserving the mode of its
existence and facticity [in der Art seines Da-Seins und So-Seins],
represents a particularization and embodiment, a manifestation and
incarnation of meaning.”
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
WORK_OF_ART
, tr.
R. Manheim
PERSON
(
3
CARDINAL
vols.
New Haven
GPE
,
Yale University Press
ORG
,
1957
DATE
),
3
CARDINAL
,
93
CARDINAL
. Cited in
C. Hamburg
PERSON
,
Symbol
ORG
and
Reality
ORG
(The Hague,
Nijhoff
PERSON
,
1956
DATE
), p.
59
CARDINAL
.
ing of another meaning in the
first
ORDINAL
, literal, and immediate meaning. As I see it the problem of the unity
of language cannot validly be posed until a fixed status has been
assigned to a group of expressions that share the peculiarity of
designating an indirect meaning in and through a direct meaning and thus
call for something like a deciphering, i.e. an interpretation, in the
precise sense of the word. To mean something other than what is
said—this is the symbolic function.
Let us proceed a bit further
in the semantic analysis of sign and symbol. In every sign a sensory
vehicle is the bearer of a signifying function that makes it stand for
something else. But I will not say that I interpret the sensory sign
when I understand what it says. Interpretation has to do with a more
complicated intentional structure: a
first
ORDINAL
meaning is set up which intends something, but this object in turn refers to something else which is intended only through the
first
ORDINAL
object.
What may lead to confusion here is the fact that in a sign there is a duality, or rather
two
CARDINAL
pairs of factors, which in each case go together to form the unity of the signification.
First
ORDINAL
there is the structural duality of the sensory sign and the
signification it carries (the signifier and the signified, in the
terminology of
Ferdinand de Saussure
ORG
);
second
ORDINAL
there is the intentional duality of the sign (both sensory and
meaningful, signifier and signified) and the thing or object designated.
This double duality, structural and intentional, is most clearly seen
in linguistic signs of conventional institution. On the one hand, words,
phonetically different according to various languages, carry identical
significations or meanings; on the other hand, these significations make
the sensory signs stand for something that the signs designate. We say
that words, by their sensible quality, express significations and that,
thanks to their signification, they designate something. The term “to
signify” covers the
twofold
CARDINAL
duality of expression and designation.
But this is not the
duality that specifies a symbol. The duality of symbolism is of a higher
degree. It is neither the duality of sensory sign and signification nor
that of signification and thing, the latter duality moreover being
inseparable from the former. In a symbol the duality is added to and
superimposed upon the duality of sen-
sory sign and
signification as a relation of meaning to meaning; it presupposes signs
that already have a primary, literal, manifest meaning. Hence I
deliberately restrict the notion of symbol to double- or
multiple-meaning expressions whose semantic texture is correlative to
the work of interpretation that explicates their
second
ORDINAL
or multiple meanings.
Though this delimitation may appear at
first
ORDINAL
to break the unity seen by Cassirer between all the signifying
functions, it helps to disengage an underlying unity, thus affording a
starting point for a new approach to
Cassirer
ORG
’s problem.
Let us try to give a panoramic view of the zones of emergence of symbolism thus conceived.
For
my part, I encountered the problem of symbolism in the semantic study I
made of the avowal of evil. I noticed that there exists no direct
discourse of avowal. Evil—whether the evil
one
CARDINAL
suffers or the evil
one
CARDINAL
commits—is always confessed by means of indirect expressions that are
taken from the sphere of everyday experience and which have the
remarkable character of analogously designating another experience. I
will provisionally call it the experience of the sacred. Thus in the
archaic form of avowal, the image of a spot—the spot that
one
CARDINAL
removes, washes, wipes away— analogously designates stain as the
sinner’s situation in the dimension of the sacred. That this is a
symbolic expression is amply confirmed both by the expressions and by
the corresponding actions of purification. None of these modes of
conduct reduces itself to a mere physical cleansing; each refers to the
others without exhausting its meaning in a material gesture; burning,
spitting, burying, washing, expelling, each act is an equivalent of or
substitute for the others, while at the same time designating something
else, namely, the restoration of integrity, of purity. Thus, all the
various stages of the feeling and experience of evil can be marked off
by semantic stages; I have shown how
one
CARDINAL
moves to the experience of sin and guilt through a series of symbolic
progressions, marked off by the images of deviation, the crooked path,
wandering, and rebellion; next, by the images of weight, burden, and
fault; and last, by the image of slavery, which encompasses them all.
This cycle of examples concerns
only one
CARDINAL
of the zones of the emergence of symbolism, the
one
CARDINAL
closest to ethical reflection, constituting what might be called the
symbolism of the servile will. Upon this symbolism is easily grafted a
whole process of reflection that leads to
St. Augustine
PERSON
and
Luther
ORG
, as well as to
Pelagius
PERSON
or
Spinoza
PERSON
. Elsewhere I will show the fruitfulness such reflection may have for
philosophy. The concern in the present work is not the richness of a
particular symbolism but the texture or structure of symbolism revealed
in it. In other words, the issue here is not the problem of evil, but
the epistemology of symbolism.
BOOK 1. PROBLEMATIC
To
carry this epistemology through successfully we must broaden our
starting point and enumerate some other areas where symbols make their
appearance. This inductive approach is the only possible way to begin
our investigation, for we are searching for the common structure of the
various manifestations of symbolic thought. The symbols we have
consulted have already attained a high level of literary elaboration;
they are already on the path of reflection; they already contain the
seeds of a moral or tragic vision, a wisdom or a theology. Going back to
less elaborated forms of symbol I discern
three
CARDINAL
different modalities of symbolism, the unity of which is not immediately apparent.
I have already alluded to the conception of symbolism in the phenomenology of religion, as developed, for example, in Van der
Leeuw
GPE
,
Maurice Leenhardt
PERSON
, and
Mircea Eliade
ORG
. Bound to rituals and myths, these symbols constitute the language of the sacred, the verbum of
the “hierophanies.
EVENT
” Whether it be the symbolism of the heavens, as a figure of the most
high and the immense, the powerful and the immutable, the sovereign and
the wise; or the symbolism of vegetation, which comes to birth, dies,
and is reborn; or of water, which threatens, cleanses, or vivifies,
these innumerable theoph-anies or hierophanies are an inexhaustible
source of symbolization. But we should be careful to note that these
symbols do not stand apart from language as values of immediate
expression, as directly perceptible physiognomies; only in the universe
of discourse do these realities take on the symbolic dimension. Even
when the elements of the universe are what carry the symbol (Heaven,
Earth
LOC
, Water, Life, etc.), it is a word—the word of consecration, of
invocation, the mythic commentary—that declares the cosmic
expressiveness, thanks to the double meaning of the words earth, heaven,
water, life, etc. The world’s expressiveness achieves language through
symbol as double meaning.
The situation is no different in the
second
ORDINAL
zone of the emergence of symbolism, that of the oneiric, if
one
CARDINAL
designates by this word the dreams of
our days
DATE
and
our nights
TIME
. It is well known that dreams are the royal road to psychoanalysis. All
question of schools aside, dreams attest that we constantly mean
something other than what we say; in dreams the manifest meaning
endlessly refers to hidden meaning; that is what makes every dreamer a
poet. From this point of view, dreams express the private archeology of
the dreamer, which at times coincides with that of entire peoples; that
is why
Freud
ORG
often limits the notion of symbol to those oneiric themes which repeat
mythology. But even when they do not coincide, the mythical and the
oneiric have in common this structure of double meaning. The dream as a
nocturnal spectacle is unknown to us; it is accessible only through the
account of
the waking hours
TIME
. The analyst interprets this account, substituting for it another text
which is, in his eyes, the thought-content of desire, i.e. what desire
would say could it speak without restraint. It must be assumed, and this
problem will occupy us at length, that dreams in themselves border on
language, since they can be told, analyzed, interpreted.
The
third
ORDINAL
zone of emergence is that of poetic imagination. I might have started
here were it not for the fact that without the detour through the cosmic
and oneiric, poetic imagination is the least understood of the
three
CARDINAL
. Too often it has been said that imagination is the power of forming
images. This is not true if by image one means the representation of an
absent or unreal thing, a process of rendering present—of
presentifying—the thing over there, elsewhere, or nowhere. In no way
does poetic imagination reduce itself to the power of forming a mental
picture of the unreal; the imagery of sensory origin merely serves as a
vehicle and as material for the verbal power whose true dimension is
given to us by the oneiric and the cosmic. As
Bachelard
PERSON
says, the poetic image “places us at the origin of articulate being”; the poetic image “becomes a
6
CARDINAL
. See below, “
Analytic
WORK_OF_ART
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
, for the discussion of the
Freudian
NORP
concept of symbolic dreams.
new being in our language, it expresses us by making us what it expresses.” <
1
CARDINAL
> This word-image, which runs through the representation-image, is symbolism.
<
1
CARDINAL
>
Gaston Bachelard
GPE
,
La Poetique de I’espace
ORG
(
Paris
GPE
, Presses Universi-taires
de France
GPE
,
1957
DATE
), p.
7
CARDINAL
.
Three
CARDINAL
times, then, the problem of symbolism has turned out to be coextensive
with the problem of language itself. There is no symbolism prior to man
who speaks, even though the power of symbols is rooted more deeply, in
the expressiveness of the cosmos, in what desire wants to say, in the
varied image-contents that men have. But in each case it is in language
that the cosmos, desire, and the imaginary achieve speech. To be sure,
the
Psalm
NORP
says: “The heavens tell the glory of God.” But the heavens do not
speak; or rather they speak through the prophets, they speak through
hymns, they speak through liturgy. There must always be a word to take
up the world and turn it into hierophany. Likewise the dreamer, in his
private dream, is closed to all; he begins to instruct us only when he
recounts his dream. This narrative is what presents the problem, just
like the hymn of the psalmist. Thus it is the poet who shows us the
birth of the word, in its hidden form in the enigmas of the cosmos and
of the psyche. The power of the poet is to show forth symbols at the
moment when “poetry places language in a state of emergence,” to quote
Bachelard
PERSON
again, <
2
CARDINAL
> whereas ritual and myth fix symbols in their hieratic stability,
and dreams close them in upon the labyrinth of desires where the dreamer
loses the thread of his forbidden and mutilated discourse.
<
2
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
10
CARDINAL
.
In order to give consistency and unity to these scattered
manifestations of symbol, I define it by a semantic structure that these
manifestations have in common, the structure of multiple meaning.
Symbols occur when language produces signs of composite degree in which
the meaning, not satisfied with designating some
one
CARDINAL
thing, designates another meaning attainable only in and through the
first
ORDINAL
intentionality.
It is here that we are tempted by another
definition which this time risks being too narrow. The definition is
suggested to us by some of our examples. It consists in characterizing
the bond of
meaning to meaning in a symbol as analogy. To revert
to the examples of the symbolism of evil, is there not an analogy
between spot and stain, deviation and sin, burden and fault, which would
be, in a way, the analogy of the physical and the existential? Is there
not also an analogy between the immensity of the heavens and the
infinity of being, whatever that signifies? Is not analogy at the root
of the “correspondences” of which the poet sings? Does not this
definition have the authority of
Platonism, Neoplatonism
WORK_OF_ART
, and the philosophies of the analogy of being?
There is no doubt
that the analogy constituting the meaning and force of many symbols is
in no way reducible to a type of argument such as reasoning by analogy,
in the strict sense of reasoning by proportionality: A is to B as C is
to
D.
NORP
The analogy that may exist between the
second
ORDINAL
meaning and the
first
ORDINAL
meaning is not a relation I can place before me and inspect from the
outside. It is not an argument; far from lending itself to
formalization, it is a relation adhering to its terms. I am carried by
the
first
ORDINAL
meaning, directed by it, toward the
second
ORDINAL
meaning; the symbolic meaning is constituted in and through the literal
meaning which achieves the analogy by giving the analogue. In contrast
to a likeness that we could look at from the outside, a symbol is the
very movement of the primary meaning intentionally assimilating us to
the symbolized, without our being able to intellectually dominate the
likeness.
This correction of the notion of analogy does not
suffice, however, to cover the whole field of hermeneutics. I would
consider rather that analogy is but
one
CARDINAL
of the relations involved between manifest and latent meaning.
Psychoanalysis
PERSON
, as we shall see, has uncovered a variety of processes of elaboration
that are operative between the apparent and the latent meaning. The
dream work is singularly more complex than the classical way of analogy;
so too
Nietzsche
ORG
and
Marx
PERSON
have denounced a multitude of ruses and falsifications of meaning. Our
entire hermeneutic problem, as we shall state in the next chapter,
proceeds from this
twofold
CARDINAL
possibility of an “innocent” analogical relationship or a “cunning”
distortion. In discussing the psychoanalytic notion of interpretaton we
will be occupied with this polarity in symbols. To have once caught
sight of it is enough to prompt a search for a definition of symbol that
would be narrower than
Cassirer
ORG
’s symbolic function and at the same time wider than the analogy of the
Platonic
ORG
tradition and literary symbolism.
In order to arbitrate the
discordance between a definition that is too “long” and a definition
that is too “short,” I propose to delimit the field of application of
the concept of symbol by reference to the act of interpretation. A
symbol exists, I shall say, where linguistic expression lends itself by
its double or multiple meanings to a work of interpretation. What gives
rise to this work is an intentional structure which consists not in the
relation of meaning to thing but in an architecture of meaning, in a
relation of meaning to meaning, of
second
ORDINAL
meaning to
first
ORDINAL
meaning, regardless of whether that relation be
one
CARDINAL
of analogy or not, or whether the
first
ORDINAL
meaning disguises or reveals the
second
ORDINAL
meaning. This texture is what makes interpretation possible, although
the texture itself is made evident only through the actual movement of
interpretation.
This double approach to symbol through a
definition that is too long and a definition that is too short leads us
to the question that will be the object of the next study: What is
interpretation? We have already glimpsed the disharmony intrinsic to the
question. In any event, the reference of symbols to a hermeneutic
understanding has a philosophic significance I would like to bring out
at
the end of this first
DATE
investigation.
It is through interpretation, we said above, that
the problem of symbols enters into the wider problem of language.
However, the link with interpretation is not external to symbols, it is
not super-added to them as a chance thought. No doubt a symbol is, in
the
Greek
NORP
sense of the word, an “enigma,” but as
Heraclitus
ORG
says, “
the Master
WORK_OF_ART
whose oracle is at
Delphi
ORG
does not speak, does not dissimulate; he signifies” (ovre
Xeyei
PERSON
ovre
KpvirTei
ORG
a\Xa crrjpaivei) ,
Enigma
PRODUCT
does not block understanding but provokes it; there is something to
unfold, to “dis-implicate” in symbols. That which arouses understanding
is precisely the double meaning, the intending of the
second
ORDINAL
meaning in and through the
first
ORDINAL
. In the figurative expressions of the servile will that constitute the symbolism of avowal I was
9
CARDINAL
.
Diels-Kranz
PERSON
,
Die Fragmente
PERSON
der
Vorsokratiker, Vol
ORG
.
1
CARDINAL
,
Heraclitus
ORG
, B
93
CARDINAL
.
able to show that it is the very excess of meaning in
comparison to the literal expression that puts the interpretation in
motion; thus, in the most archaic symbolism, the penitent spontaneously
intends the meaning of stain in that of spot. In order to characterize
this manner of living in and through analogy without the latter being
recognized as a distinct semantic structure, one can speak of symbolic
naivete; but this naivete is from the start moving toward interpretation
by virtue of that transgression of meaning by meaning at the heart of
the symbolic structure. In general terms, every mythos involves a latent
logos which demands to be exhibited. That is why there are no symbols
without the beginning of interpretation; where
one
CARDINAL
man dreams, prophesies, or poetizes, another rises up to interpret.
Interpretation organically belongs to symbolic thought and its double
meaning.
This appeal to an interpretation that proceeds from
symbols assures us that a reflection upon symbols falls within a
philosophy of language and even within a philosophy of reason, as we
shall try to show when we confront the meaning of symbol in hermeneutics
with its meaning in symbolic logic. In hermeneutics symbols have their
own semantics, they stimulate an intellectual activity of deciphering,
of finding a hidden meaning. Far from falling outside the bounds of
language, they raise feeling to meaningful articulation. Thus “avowal”
has seemed to me a word that tears feeling from its mute opacity; all
the stages of feeling can thus be marked off by semantic stages. Symbols
are not a nonlanguage; the split between univocal and plurivocal
language extends across the empire of language. That which reveals the
richness or overdetermination of meaning and demonstrates that symbols
belong to integral discourse is the work, perhaps interminable, of
interpretation.
The time has come to say what interpretation is
and how psychoanalytic interpretation enters into the conflict between
interpretations. It is only at
the end of this first
DATE
sketch of hermeneutic understanding that we will be able to come back
to the unsettled problem of the double nature, univocal and equivocal,
of discourse, and also to confront the notion of symbol in hermeneutics
with the notion of symbol in symbolic logic.
Chapter 2
LAW
:
The Conflict of Interpretations
WORK_OF_ART
At the end of the preceding study we asked, What is interpretation? This question governs the following
one
CARDINAL
: How does psychoanalysis become involved in the conflict of
interpretations? The question of interpretation, however, is no less
perplexing than that of symbol. We thought we could arbitrate the
differences concerning the definition of symbol by appealing to an
intentional structure, the structure of double meaning, which in turn is
brought to light only in the work of interpretation. But the concept of
interpretation itself poses a problem.
THE CONCEPT OF
INTERPRETATION
Let us
first
ORDINAL
settle a difficulty which is still merely verbal and which has been
implicitly resolved by our intermediate definition of symbol.
If we consult the tradition we meet with
two
CARDINAL
usages; the
one
CARDINAL
proposes to us a concept of interpretation that is too short, the other a concept that is too long. These
two
CARDINAL
variations in the extension of the concept of interpretation reflect
fairly closely the ones we considered in the definition of symbol. If we
recall here the
two
CARDINAL
historical roots of these discordant traditions,
the Peri Hermeneias of Aristotle
LAW
and biblical exegesis, it is because they give a rather good indication
of what corrections are to be made if one is to arrive at our
intermediate concept of hermeneutics.
Start
LAW
with
Aristotle
GPE
. As is well known, the
second
ORDINAL
treatise of the
Organon
GPE
is called
the Peri Hermeneias
LAW
, On Interpretation. From it stems what I call the overly “long” concept
of interpretation, a concept somewhat reminiscent of symbol in the
sense of the symbolic
PERSON
function of
Cassirer
ORG
and many of the moderns. It is legitimate to look for the origin of our own problem in the
Aristotelian
NORP
notion of interpretation, even though the connection with the
Aristotelian
NORP
“interpretation” seems purely verbal: the word itself figures only in
the title; what is more, it designates not a science dealing with
significations but signification itself, that of nouns, verbs,
propositions, and discourse in general. Interpretation is any voiced
sound endowed with significance—every phone semantike, every vox
significativa. In this sense nouns, and verbs also, are of themselves
already interpretations, since in them we utter something. But the
simple utterance or phasis is only a part taken from the total meaning
of the logos; the complete meaning of hermeneia appears only in the
complex enunciation, the sentence, which
Aristotle
GPE
calls logos and which covers commands, wishes, and questions as well as
declarative discourse or apophansis. Hermeneia, in the complete sense,
is the signification of the sentence. But in the strong sense of the
logician it is the sentence susceptible of truth or falsity, that is,
the declarative proposition. The logician leaves the other
1
PRODUCT
. In
Aristotle
GPE
, moreover, sumbolon designates the expressive power of voiced sounds
with respect to the states of the soul (ta pathemata). A symbol is a
conventional sign for the states of the soul, whereas the latter are the
images (homoidmata) of things. Interpretation has therefore the same
extension as symbol; the
two
CARDINAL
words cover the totality of conventional signs, either in their
expressive value or in their significative value. The treatise On
Interpretation does not again speak of symbols (except in
16a 28
DATE
), seeing that the theory of expression does not come under this treatise but under the treatise On the
Soul
WORK_OF_ART
. The present treatise deals exclusively with signification.
Pierre Aubenque
PERSON
, in his
Le Probleme de
ORG
I’etre chez
Aristote
PERSON
(
Paris
GPE
, Presses Universitaires de France,
1962
DATE
), p.
107
CARDINAL
, remarks that
Aristotle
ORG
sometimes takes the word “symbol” in the sense of signification. The
dominant idea remains that of conventional sign; a symbol is the
intermediary instituted between thought and being. Thus we are set on
the path of
Cassirer—through Kant
ORG
, it is true!
2
DATE
. “A noun is a voiced sound having a meaning by convention with no
reference to time, while no part of it has any meaning when taken
separately”
(On Interpretation, Ch.
WORK_OF_ART
2, 16a 19
DATE
).
3
CARDINAL
. “A verb is that which, in addition to its particular meaning, has a
reference to time; no part of it has meaning by itself, and it is always
a sign of something said of something else” (ibid., Ch.
3, 16b 5
DATE
).
4
CARDINAL
. “An affirmation is a statement asserting something of something; a
negation is a statement separating something from something” (ibid., Ch.
6
CARDINAL
,
17
CARDINAL
“
25
CARDINAL
).
types of discourse to rhetoric and poetics and retains only declarative discourse, the
first
ORDINAL
form of which is the affirmation that “says something of something.”
Let
us stop with these definitions: they suffice to clarify in what sense
the “semantic voice”—the signifying word—is interpretation. It is
interpretation in the sense that, for
Cassirer
ORG
, the symbol is universal mediation; we say the real by signifying it;
in this sense we interpret it. The break between signification and the
thing has already occurred with nouns, and this intervening distance
marks the locus of interpretation. Not all discourse is necessarily
within the true; it does not adhere to being. In this regard, nouns that
designate fictitious things—the “goat-stag
” of Ch
WORK_OF_ART
.
1
CARDINAL
of the
Aristotelian
NORP
treatise—clearly show that there can be signification without the
positing of existence. But we would not have thought of calling nouns
“interpretation” if we did not see their signifying import in the light
of that of verbs and that of verbs in the context of discourse, and if,
in its turn, the signifying import of discourse were not concentrated in
declarative discourse that says something of something. To say
something of something is, in the complete and strong sense of the term,
to interpret.
How does this “interpretation,” proper to the
declarative proposition, orient us toward the modern concept of
hermeneutics? The connection is not immediately evident. The “to say
something of something” interests
Aristotle
GPE
only insofar as it is the locus of the true and the false. Hence the
problem of the opposition between affirmation and negation becomes the
central theme of the treatise; the semantics of the declarative
proposition serves merely as an introduction to the logic of
propositions which is essentially a logic of opposition, and the latter
in turn leads to the
Analytics
GPE
, i.e. the logic of arguments. This logical aim prevents the development of
5
CARDINAL
. The notion of interpretation conies to the fore in the verb. On the
one hand the verb looks to the noun, since it “adds to the meaning of
the noun the meaning of present existence.” On the other hand “it is
always a sign of something said of something else”;
Aristotle
ORG
explains this formula thus: “Moreover, a verb is always a sign of
something said of something else, i.e. of something predicated of a
subject or contained in a subject” (ibid., Ch.
3, 16b 10
DATE
). Thus a verb looks toward the sentence or declarative discourse; in
this sense it is as it were an instrument of the attribution which it
“interprets,” i.e. “signifies.”
semantics for its own sake.
Further, the way to a hermeneutics of double-meaning significations
appears blocked from another side. The notion of signification requires
univocity of meaning: the definition of the principle of identity, in
its logical and ontological sense, demands it. Univocity of meaning is
ultimately grounded in essence,
one
CARDINAL
and self-identical; the entire refutation of the sophistical arguments is based upon this recourse to essence: “Not to have
one
CARDINAL
meaning is to have no meaning.” Thus communication between men is possible only if words have a meaning, i.e.
one
CARDINAL
meaning.
A reflection that extends the properly semantic
analysis of the “to say something of something” leads us back to the
area of our own problem. If man interprets reality by saying something
of something, it is because real meanings are indirect; I attain things
only by attributing a meaning to a meaning. Predication, in the logical
sense of the term, puts into canonical form a relation of signification
that forces us to reexamine the theory of univocity. The study of
sophistical reasoning poses not
one
CARDINAL
problem but
two
CARDINAL
: the problem of the univocity of meanings without which dialogue is
impossible, and the problem of their “communication”—to use the
expression of
Plato
PERSON
’s
Sophist
NORP
—without which attribution is impossible. Without this counterpart
univocity condemns one to a logical atomism, according to which a
meaning simply is what it is. It is not enough to struggle against
sophistic equivocity; a
second
ORDINAL
front must be opened against
Eleatic
ORG
univocity. Nor is this
second
ORDINAL
struggle without an echo in the philosophy of
Aristotle
GPE
. It breaks out even at the heart of the
Metaphysics
ORG
; the notion of being cannot be univo-cally defined: “being is said in
several ways”; being means substance, quality, time, place, and so on.
The famous distinction of the many meanings of being is not an anomaly
in discourse, an exception in the theory of signification. The many
meanings of being are the categories—or figures—of predication; hence
this multiplicity cuts across the whole of discourse. Nor can it be
overcome. Although it does not constitute a pure disorder of words,
seeing that the different meanings of the word “being” are all ordered
by reference to a
first
ORDINAL
, original meaning, still this unity of reference—
6
CARDINAL
. Metaphysics r(IV),
1006b 7
DATE
.
pros hen legomenon—does not make
one
CARDINAL
signification; the notion of being, it has recently been said, is but
“the problematic unity of an irreducible plurality of meanings.”
I do not mean to draw from the general semantics of
the Peri Hermeneias
EVENT
and from the particular semantics of the word “being” more than is allowed; I do not say that
Aristotle
GPE
raised the problem of plurivocal meanings in the way we shall elaborate
it here. I merely suggest that his definition of interpretation as “to
say something of something” leads to a semantics distinct from logic and
that his discussion of the multiple meanings of being opens a breach in
the purely logical and ontological theory of univocity. The task of
founding a theory of interpretation, conceived as the understanding of
plurivocal meanings, has not yet been accomplished. The
second
ORDINAL
tradition will bring us closer to the goal.
The
second
ORDINAL
tradition comes to us from biblical exegesis. Hermeneutics in this
sense is the science of the rules of exegesis, the latter being
understood as the particular interpretation of a text. There is no
question that the problem of hermeneutics has to a great extent been
constituted within the boundaries of the interpretation of
Holy Scripture
ORG
. The core of this hermeneutics lies in what has traditionally been called the “
four
CARDINAL
senses of
Scripture
ORG
.” It cannot be emphasized too strongly that philosophers should be more
attentive to those exegetical discussions in which a general theory of
interpretation was operative. There in particular the notions of
analogy, allegory, and symbolic meaning were elaborated—notions to which
we shall frequently have to return. This
second
ORDINAL
tradition, then, relates hermeneutics to the definition of symbol by
analogy, although it does not entirely reduce hermeneutics to this
definition.
What limits the definition of exegetical hermeneutics is,
first
ORDINAL
, its reference to an authority, whether monarchical, collegial, or
ecclesiastic, the latter being the case of biblical hermeneutics as
practiced within the
Christian
NORP
communities. Most of all, however, it is limited by being applied to a literary text: exegesis is a science of writings.
Still, the exegetical tradition affords a good starting point for our
7
CARDINAL
.
Aubenque
PERSON
, p.
204
CARDINAL
.
8
CARDINAL
.
Henri de Lubac
ORG
,
Exegese
ORG
medievale (
4
CARDINAL
vols.
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
,
1959—64
CARDINAL
).
enterprise, for the notion of text can be taken in an analogous sense. Thanks to the metaphor of “the book of nature”
the Middle Ages
WORK_OF_ART
was able to speak of an interpretatio naturae. This metaphor brings to
light a possible extension of the notion of exegesis, inasmuch as the
notion of “text” is wider than that of “scripture.” With the
Renaissance
ORG
the interpretatio naturae was completely freed from its properly scriptural references, with the result that
Spinoza
GPE
could use it to inaugurate a new conception of biblical exegesis. The interpretation of nature, he says in
the Theologico-Political Treatise
ORG
, is to inspire a new hermeneutics ruled by the principle of the interpretation of Scripture by itself. This step of
Spinoza
PERSON
’s, which does not interest us here from the strictly biblical point of
view, marks a curious rebound of the interpretatio naturae upon the
interpretation of Scripture: the former scriptural model is now called
into question, and the new model is henceforward the interpretatio
naturae.
This notion of text—thus freed from the notion of scripture or writing—is of considerable interest.
Freud
ORG
often makes use of it, particularly when he compares the work of
analysis to translating from one language to another; the dream account
is an unintelligible text for which the analyst substitutes a more
intelligible text. To understand is to make this substitution. The title
Traumdeutung
GPE
, which we have briefly considered, alludes to this analogy between analysis and exegesis.
At this point we may draw an initial comparison between
Freud
ORG
and
Nietzsche
ORG
.
Nietzsche
ORG
borrowed the concept of
Deutung
PERSON
or
Auslegung
PERSON
from the discipline of philology and introduced it into philosophy. It is true that
Nietzsche
ORG
remains a philologist when he interprets
Greek
NORP
tragedy or the pre-Socratics, but with him the whole of philosophy
becomes interpretation. Interpretation of what? We shall answer that
question later, when we enter into the conflict of interpretation. For
the present this point can be made: the new career opened up for the
concept of interpretation is linked to a new problematic of
representation, of
Vorstellung
PERSON
. It is no longer the
Kantian
NORP
question of how a subjective representation or idea can have objective
validity; this question, central to a critical philosophy, gives way to a
more radical one. The problem of objective validity still remained in
the orbit of the Platonic philosophy of truth and science, of which
error and opinion are the contraries. The problem of interpretation
refers to a new possibility which is no longer either error in the
epistemological sense or lying in the moral sense, but illusion, the
status of which we will discuss further on. Let us leave aside for the
moment the problem we shall turn to shortly, namely, the use of
interpretation as a tactic of suspicion and as a battle against masks;
this use calls for a very specific philosophy which subordinates the
entire problem of truth and error to the expression of the will to
power. The important point here, from the standpoint of method, is the
new extension given to the exegeti-cal concept of interpretation.
Freud
ORG
’s position lies at
one
CARDINAL
of the ends of this extension. For him, interpretation is concerned not
only with a scripture or writing but with any set of signs that may be
taken as a text to decipher, hence a dream or neurotic symptom, as well
as a ritual, myth, work of art, or a belief. Thus we return to our
notion of symbol as double meaning, with the question still undecided
whether double meaning is dissimulation or revelation, necessary lying
or access to the sacred. We had in mind an enlarged concept of exegesis
when we defined hermeneutics as the science of exegetical rules and
exegesis as the interpretation of a particular text or of a set of signs
considered as a text.
As may be seen, this intermediate
definition, which goes beyond a mere scriptural science without being
dissolved in a general theory of meaning, receives its authority from
both sources. The exegetical source seems the closer, but the problem of
univocity and equivocity to which interpretation in the
Aristotelian
NORP
sense leads us is perhaps still more radical than the problem of
analogy in exegesis. We return to this in the next chapter. On the other
hand, the problem of illusion, central to
the Nietzschian Auslegung
ORG
, brings us to the threshold of the key difficulty that governs the fate
of modern hermeneutics. This difficulty, which we shall now consider,
is not a mere duplicate of the
one
CARDINAL
involved in the definition of symbol; it is a difficulty peculiar to the act of interpreting as such.
The difficulty—it initiated my research in the
first
ORDINAL
place—is this: there is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis,
but
only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of
interpretation. The hermeneutic field, whose outer contours we have
traced, is internally at variance with itself.
I have neither the
intention nor the means to attempt a complete enumeration of
hermeneutic styles. The more enlightening course, it seems to me, is to
start with the polarized opposition that creates the greatest tension at
the outset of our investigation. According to the
one
CARDINAL
pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration
of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation,
or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other pole, it is
understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion.
Psychoanalysis, at least on a
first
ORDINAL
reading, aligns itself with the
second
ORDINAL
understanding of hermeneutics.
From the beginning we must
consider this double possibility: this tension, this extreme polarity,
is the truest expression of our “modernity.” The situation in which
language
today
DATE
finds itself comprises this double possibility, this double
solicitation and urgency: on the one hand, purify discourse of its
excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety,
realize our state of poverty once and for all; on the other hand, use
the most “nihilistic,” destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let
speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew,
when meaning was at its fullest. Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated
by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to
listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience. In our time we have not finished
doing away with idols and we have barely begun to listen to symbols. It
may be that this situation, in its apparent distress, is instructive:
it may be that extreme iconoclasm belongs to the restoration of meaning.
The underlying reason for initially posing the problem in the above way is to bring into the open the crisis of language that
today
DATE
makes us oscillate between demystification and restoration of meaning.
To my mind, an introduction to the psychoanalysis of culture has had to
proceed in this roundabout way. In the next chapter we will try to probe
deeper into these prolegomena and relate the crisis of language to an
ascesis of reflection whose
first
ORDINAL
movement is to let itself be dispossessed of the origin of meaning.
To finish locating psychoanalysis within the general discussion of language, the terms of the conflict need to be sketched.
INTERPRETATION AS RECOLLECTION OF MEANING
This
section is concerned with hermeneutics as the restoration of meaning.
The point at issue in the psychoanalysis of culture and the school of
suspicion is better understood if we
first
ORDINAL
contrast what is radically opposed to them.
The contrary of suspicion, I will say bluntly, is faith. What faith? No longer, to be sure, the
first
ORDINAL
faith of the simple soul, but rather the
second
ORDINAL
faith of one who has engaged in hermeneutics, faith that has undergone
criticism, postcritical faith. Let us look for it in the series of
philosophic decisions that secretly animate a phenomenology of religion
and lie hidden even within its apparent neutrality. It is a rational
faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks, through
interpretation, a
second
ORDINAL
naivete. Phenomenology is its instrument of hearing, of recollection,
of restoration of meaning. “Believe in order to understand, understand
in order to believe” —such is its maxim; and its maxim is the
“hermeneutic circle” itself of believing and understanding.
We will take our examples from the phenomenology of religion in the wide sense, embracing here the work of
Leenhardt
GPE
,
Van
NORP
der
Leeuw
GPE
, and
Eliade
GPE
, to which I add my own research in
The Symbolism of Evil
WORK_OF_ART
.
It will be our task to disengage and display the rational faith
that runs through the purely intentional analysis of religious
symbolism and “converts” this listening analysis from within.
The
first
ORDINAL
imprint of this faith in a revelation through the word is to be seen in
the care or concern for the object, a characteristic of all
phenomenological analysis. That concern, as we know, presents itself as a
“neutral” wish to describe and not to reduce.
One
CARDINAL
reduces by explaining through causes (psychological, social, etc.),
through genesis (individual, historical, etc.), through function
(affective, ideological, etc.).
One
CARDINAL
describes by disengaging the (noetic) inten-
tion and its
(noematic) correlate—the something intended, the implicit object in
ritual, myth, and belief. Thus, in the case of the symbolism of the pure
and the impure alluded to in
Chapter 1
LAW
, the task is to understand what is signified, what quality of the
sacred is intended, what shade of threat is implied in the analogy
between spot and stain, between physical contamination and the loss of
existential integrity. In my own research, concern for the object
consisted in surrender to the movement of meaning which, starting from
the literal sense—the spot or contamination—points to something grasped
in the region of the sacred. To generalize from this, we shall say that
the theme of the phenomenology of religion is the something intended in
ritual actions, in mythical speech, in belief or mystical feeling; its
task is to dis-implicate that object from the various intentions of
behavior, discourse, and emotion. Let us call this intended object the
“sacred,” without determining its nature, whether it be the tremendum
numinosum, according to
Rudolf Otto
PERSON
; “the powerful,” according to
Van der Leeuw
ORG
; or “fundamental
Time
ORG
,” according to
Eliade
GPE
. In this general sense, and with a view to underlining the concern for
the intentional object, we may say that every phenomenology of religion
is a phenomenology of the sacred. However, is it possible for a
phenomenology of the sacred to stay within the limits of a neutral
attitude governed by the epoche, by the bracketing of absolute reality
and of every question concerning the absolute? The epoche requires that I
participate in the belief in the reality of the religious object, but
in a neutralized mode; that I believe with the believer, but without
positing absolutely the object of his belief.
But while the
scientist as such can and must practice this method of bracketing, the
philosopher as such cannot and must not avoid the question of the
absolute validity of his object. For would I be interested in the
object, could I stress concern for the object, through the consideration
of cause, genesis, or function, if I did not expect, from within
understanding, this something to “address” itself to me? Is not the
expectation of being spoken to what motivates the concern for the
object?
Implied
ORG
in this expectation is a confidence in language: the belief that
language, which bears symbols, is not so much spoken by men as spoken to
men, that men are
born into language, into the light of the
logos “who enlightens every man who comes into the world.” It is this
expectation, this confidence, this belief, that confers on the study of
symbols its particular seriousness. To be truthful, I must say it is
what animates all my research. But it is also what
today
DATE
is contested by the whole stream of hermeneutics that we shall soon
place under the heading of “suspicion.” This latter theory of
interpretation begins by doubting whether there is such an object and
whether this object could be the place of the transformation of
intentionality into kerygma, manifestation, proclamation. This
hermeneutics is not an explication of the object, but a tearing off of
masks, an interpretation that reduces disguises.
Second
ORDINAL
, according to the phenomenology of religion, there is a “truth” of symbols; this truth, in the neutral attitude of the
Husserl
PERSON
-ian epoche, means merely the fulfillment—die
Erfiillung—of
PERSON
the signifying intention. For a phenomenology of religion to be
possible, it is necessary and sufficient that there be not only one but
several ways of fulfilling various intentions of meaning according to
various regions of objects. Verification, in the sense of logical
positivism, is
one
CARDINAL
type of fulfillment among others and not the canonical mode of
fulfillment; it is a type required by the corresponding type of object,
namely, the physical object and, in another sense, the historical
object—but not by the concept of truth as such, or, in other words, by
the requirement of fulfillment in general. It is in virtue of this
multiplicity of types of fulfillment that phenomenology, in a reduced,
neutralized mode, speaks of religious experience, not by analogy, but
according to the specific type of object and the specific mode of
fulfillment in that field.
We encountered this problem of
fulfillment in the order of symbolic meanings in our investigation of
the analogical bond between the primary or literal “signifier” and the
secondary “signified”—for example, the bond between spot and stain,
between deviation (or wandering) and sin, between weight (or burden) and
fault. Here we run up against a primordial, unfailing relationship,
which never has the conventional and arbitrary character of “technical”
signs that mean only what is posited in them.
In this
relationship of meaning to meaning resides what I have called the
fullness of language. The fullness consists in the fact that
the
second
ORDINAL
meaning somehow dwells in the
first
ORDINAL
meaning. In his
Traite d’histoire
ORG
generate des religions,
Mircea Eliade
ORG
clearly shows that the force of the cosmic symbolism resides in the
nonar-bitrary bond between the visible heavens and the order they
manifest: thanks to the analogical power that binds meaning to meaning,
the heavens speak of the wise and the just, the immense and the ordered.
Symbols are bound in a double sense: bound to and bound by. On the one
hand, the sacred is bound to its primary, literal, sensible meanings;
this is what constitutes the opacity of symbols. On the other hand, the
literal meaning is bound by the symbolic meaning that resides in it;
this is what I have called the revealing power of symbols, which gives
them their force in spite of their opacity. The revealing power of
symbols opposes symbols to technical signs, which merely signify what is
posited in them and which, therefore, can be emptied, formalized, and
reduced to mere objects of a calculus. Symbols alone give what they say.
But
in saying this have we not already broken the phenomenological
neutrality? I admit it. I admit that what deeply motivates the interest
in full language, in bound language, is this inversion of the movement
of thought which now addresses itself to me and makes me a subject that
is spoken to. And this inversion is produced in analogy. How? How does
that which binds meaning to meaning bind me? The movement that draws me
toward the
second
ORDINAL
meaning assimilates me to what is said, makes me participate in what is
announced to me. The similitude in which the force of symbols resides
and from which they draw their revealing power is not an objective
likeness, which I may look upon like a relation laid out before me; it
is an existential assimilation, according to the movement of analogy, of
my being to being.
This allusion to the ancient theme of participation helps us make a
third
ORDINAL
step along the path of explication, which is also the path of
intellectual honesty: the fully declared philosophical decision
animating the intentional analysis would be a modern version of the
ancient theme of reminiscence. After the silence and forgetfulness made
widespread by the manipulation of empty signs and the construction of
formalized languages, the modern concern for symbols expresses a new
desire to be addressed.
This expectancy of a new
Word
PRODUCT
, of a new tidings of the
Word
PRODUCT
, is
the implicit intention of every phenomenology of symbols, which
first
ORDINAL
puts the accent on the object, then underscores the fullness of symbol,
to finally greet the revealing power of the primal word.
INTERPRETATION AS EXERCISE
OF SUSPICION
We shall complete our assigning of a place to
Freud
ORG
by giving him not just one interlocutor but a whole company. Over
against interpretation as restoration of meaning we shall oppose
interpretation according to what I collectively call the school of
suspicion.
A general theory of interpretation would thus have to account not only for the opposition between
two
CARDINAL
interpretations of interpretation, the one as recollection of meaning,
the other as reduction of the illusions and lies of consciousness; but
also for the division and scattering of each of these
two
QUANTITY
great “schools” of interpretation into “theories” that differ from one
another and are even foreign to one another. This is no doubt truer of
the school of suspicion than of the school of reminiscence.
Three
CARDINAL
masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion:
Marx
PERSON
,
Nietzsche
ORG
, and
Freud
ORG
. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the
sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the “revelation” of meaning,
than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.
It is relatively easy to note that these three figures all contest the
primacy of the object in our representation of the sacred, as well as
the fulfilling of the intention of the sacred by a type of analogy of
being that would engraft us onto being through the power of an
assimilating intention. It is also easy to recognize that this
contesting is an exercise of suspicion in
three
CARDINAL
different ways; “truth as lying” would be the negative heading under which one might place these
three
CARDINAL
exercises of suspicion. But we are still far from having assimilated the positive meaning of the enterprises of these
three
CARDINAL
thinkers. We are still too attentive to their differences and to the
limitations that the prejudices of their times impose upon their
successors even more than upon themselves. Thus
Marx
PERSON
is relegated to economics and the absurd theory of the
reflex consciousness;
Nietzsche
ORG
is drawn toward biologism and a perspectivism incapable of expressing itself without contradiction;
Freud
ORG
is restricted to psychiatry and decked out with a simplistic pansexualism.
If
we go back to the intention they had in common, we find in it the
decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as “false”
consciousness. They thereby take up again, each in a different manner,
the problem of the
Cartesian
NORP
doubt, to carry it to the very heart of the
Cartesian
NORP
stronghold. The philosopher trained in the school of
Descartes
PERSON
knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear;
but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to
itself; in consciousness, meaning and conciousness of meaning coincide.
Since
Marx
PERSON
,
Nietzsche
ORG
, and
Freud
ORG
, this too has become doubtful. After the doubt about things, we have started to doubt consciousness.
These
three
CARDINAL
masters of suspicion are not to be misunderstood, however, as
three
CARDINAL
masters of skepticism. They are, assuredly,
three
CARDINAL
great “destroyers.” But that of itself should not mislead us; destruction,
Heidegger
PERSON
says in
Sein
PERSON
und
Zeit
WORK_OF_ART
, is a moment of every new foundation, including the destruction of religion, insofar as religion is, in
Nietzsche
ORG
’s phrase,
a “Platonism for the people.
WORK_OF_ART
” It is beyond destruction that the question is posed as to what thought, reason, and even faith still signify.
All
three
CARDINAL
clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of
Truth
ORG
, not only by means of a “destructive” critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.
Descartes
PERSON
triumphed over the doubt as to things by the evidence of consciousness;
they triumph over the doubt as to consciousness by an exegesis of
meaning. Beginning with them, understanding is hermeneutics:
henceforward, to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the
consciousness of meaning, but to decipher its expressions. What must be
faced, therefore, is not only a threefold suspicion, but a threefold
guile. If consciousness is not what it thinks it is, a new relation must
be instituted between the patent and the latent; this new relation
would correspond to the one that consciousness had instituted between
appearances and the reality of things. For
Marx
PERSON
,
Nietzsche
ORG
, and
Freud
ORG
, the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation
hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-man if ested. That the
Marxists
ORG
are stubbornly insistent on the “reflex” theory, that
Nietzsche
ORG
contradicts himself in dogmatizing about the “perspectivism” of the will to power, that
Freud
ORG
mythologizes with his “censorship,” “watchman,” and “disguises”—still,
what is essential does not he in these encumbrances and impasses. What
is essential is that all
three
CARDINAL
create with the means at hand, with and against the prejudices of their
times, a mediate science of meaning, irreducible to the immediate
consciousness of meaning. What all
three
CARDINAL
attempted, in different ways, was to make their “conscious” methods of
deciphering coincide with the “unconscious” work of ciphering which they
attributed to the will to power, to social being, to the unconscious
psychism. Guile will be met by double guile.
DATE
Thus the distinguishing characteristic of
Marx
PERSON
,
Freud
PERSON
, and
Nietzsche
ORG
is the general hypothesis concerning both the process of false consciousness and the method of deciphering. The
two
CARDINAL
go together, since the man of suspicion carries out in reverse the work of falsification of the man of guile.
Freud
ORG
entered the problem of false consciousness via the double road of
dreams and neurotic symptoms; his working hypothesis has the same limits
as his angle of attack, which was, as we shall state fully in the
sequel, an economics of instincts.
Marx
PERSON
attacks the problem of ideologies from within the limits of economic alienation, now in the sense of political economy.
Nietzsche
ORG
, focusing on the problem of “value”—of evaluation and transvaluation—looks for the key to lying and masks on the side of
the “force”
EVENT
and “weakness” of the will to power.
Fundamentally,
the Genealogy of Morals
WORK_OF_ART
in
Nietzsche
ORG
’s sense, the theory of ideologies in the
Marxist
NORP
sense, and the theory of ideals and illusions in
Freud
ORG
’s sense represent
three
CARDINAL
convergent procedures of demystification.
Yet there is perhaps something they have even more in common, an underlying relationship that goes even deeper. All
three
CARDINAL
begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering; all
three
CARDINAL
, however, far from being detractors of “consciousness,” aim at extending it. What
Marx
PERSON
wants is to liberate praxis by the understanding of necessity; but this liberation is inseparable from a “conscious in-
sight” which victoriously counterattacks the mystification of false consciousness. What
Nietzsche
ORG
wants is the increase of man’s power, the restoration of his force; but
the meaning of the will to power must be recaptured by meditating on
the ciphers “superman,” “eternal return,” and “
Dionysus
WORK_OF_ART
,” without which the power in question would be but worldly violence. What
Freud
ORG
desires is that the one who is analyzed, by making his own the meaning
that was foreign to him, enlarge his field of consciousness, live
better, and finally be a little freer and, if possible, a little
happier.
One
CARDINAL
of the earliest homages paid to psychoanalysis speaks of “healing
through consciousness.” The phrase is exact—if one means thereby that
analysis wishes to substitute for an immediate and dissimulating
consciousness a mediate consciousness taught by the reality principle.
Thus the same doubter who depicts the ego as a “poor creature” in
subjection to
three
CARDINAL
masters, the id, the superego, and reality or necessity, is also the
exegete who rediscovers the logic of the illogical kingdom and who
dares, with unparalleled modesty and discretion, to terminate his essay
on
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
by invoking the god Logos, soft of voice but indefatigable, in no wise omnipotent, but efficacious in the long run.
This last reference to
Freud
ORG
’s “reality principle” and to its equivalents in
Nietzsche
ORG
and
Marx
PERSON
—eternal return in the former, understood necessity in the latter—brings
out the positive benefit of the ascesis required by a reductive and
destructive interpretation: confrontation with bare reality, the
discipline of
Ananke
PERSON
, of necessity.
While finding their positive convergence, our
three
CARDINAL
masters of suspicion also present the most radically contrary stance to
the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as
the recollection of meaning and as the reminiscence of being.
At
issue in this controversy is the fate of what I shall call, for the sake
of brevity, the mytho-poetic core of imagination. Over against illusion
and the fable-making function, demystifying hermeneutics sets up the
rude discipline of necessity. It is the lesson of Spinoza:
one
CARDINAL
first
ORDINAL
finds himself a slave, he understands his slavery, he rediscovers himself free within understood necessity. The Ethics is the
first
ORDINAL
model of the ascesis that must be undergone by the
libido, the
will to power, the imperialism of the dominant class. But, in return,
does not this discipline of the real, this ascesis of the necessary lack
the grace of imagination, the upsurge of the possible? And does not
this grace of imagination have something to do with the Word as
Revelation
WORK_OF_ART
?
This is what is at issue in the debate. Our question now is to
determine to what extent such a debate can still be arbitrated within
the limits of a philosophy of reflection.
Chapter
3
CARDINAL
:
Hermeneutic Method
PERSON
and Reflective Philosophy
We assigned ourselves the task, in these beginning chapters, of placing
Freud
ORG
within the movement of contemporary thought. Before becoming involved
with its technical language and specific problem we wanted to
reconstruct the context in which psychoanalysis is set. We
first
ORDINAL
fixed its hermeneutics of culture upon the background of the
problematic of language. From the outset we have looked upon
psychoanalysis as throwing light upon and contesting human speech;
Freud
ORG
belongs to our time just as much as
Wittgenstein
PERSON
and
Bultmann
PERSON
. The place of psychoanalysis within the general debate on language
might be more precisely described as an episode in the war between the
various hermeneutics, though this does not tell us whether
psychoanalysis is but
one
CARDINAL
hermeneutic sect among others or whether, in a manner we shall have to
discover, it encroaches upon all the others. In this chapter we would
like to go further and discern in psychoanalysis, in the hermeneutic war
itself, and in the problematic of language as a whole, a crisis of
reflection—that is to say, in the strong and philosophic sense of the
term, an adventure of the
Cogito
PERSON
and of the reflective philosophy that proceeds therefrom.
THE RECOURSE OF SYMBOLS
TO REFLECTION
I
will begin by retracing the path of my own inquiry. It was as a
requirement of lucidity, of veracity, of rigor, that I encountered what I
called, at the end of
The Symbolism of Evil
WORK_OF_ART
, “the passage to reflection.” Is it possible, I asked, to co-
herently
interrelate the interpretation of symbols and philosophic reflection?
My only answer to this question was in the form of a contradictory
resolve: I vowed, on the one hand, to listen to the rich words of
symbols and myths that precede my reflection, instruct and nourish it;
and on the other hand to continue, by means of the philosophical
exegesis of symbols and myths, the tradition of rationality of
philosophy, of our western philosophy. Symbols give rise to thought, I
said, using a phrase from
Kant’s Critique of Judgment
ORG
. Symbols give, they are the gift of language; but this gift creates for
me the duty to think, to inaugurate philosophic discourse, starting
from what is always prior to and the foundation of that discourse. I did
not conceal the paradoxical character of this promise; on the contrary,
I accentuated it by affirming
first
ORDINAL
that philosophy does not begin anything, since the fullness of language precedes it, and
second
ORDINAL
that it begins from itself, since it is philosophy which inaugurates the question of meaning and of the foundation of meaning.
I
was encouraged along these lines by what appeared to me to be a
prephilosophical richness of symbols. Symbols, it seemed to me, call not
only for interpretation, as we said in the
first
ORDINAL
chapter, but for philosophic reflection. If this did not become
apparent to us sooner, it is because we have restricted ourselves up to
now to the semantic structure of symbols, that is, to the excess of
meaning due to their “overdetermination.”
That symbols call for reflection, however, is due to a
second
ORDINAL
trait of symbols which we have left in the shadows; the purely semantic
aspect is merely their most abstract aspect. Linguistic expressions are
embodied not only in rituals and emotions, as was suggested above when
we mentioned the symbolism of the pure and the impure, but also in
myths, that is, in the great narratives about the beginning and the end
of evil. I have studied
four
CARDINAL
cycles of these myths: the myths of the primal chaos, the myths of the
wicked god, the myths of the soul exiled in an evil body, and the myths
concerning the historical fault of an individual who is both an ancestor
and a prototype of humanity. New traits of symbol appear here, and with
them new suggestions for a hermeneutics.
First
ORDINAL
, these myths introduce exemplary personages—Prometheus, Anthropos,
Adam—who
PERSON
begin to generalize human experience on the level of
a universal concept or paradigm in which we can read our condition and destiny.
Second
ORDINAL
, thanks to the structure of the narrative that tells of events that
happened “once upon a time,” our experience receives a temporal
orientation, an elan extended between a beginning and an end; our
present becomes charged with a memory and a hope. More profoundly still,
these myths recount, after the manner of a transhistorical event, the
irrational break, the absurd leap, which separates
two
CARDINAL
views,
one
CARDINAL
concerned with the innocence of coming-to-be, the other with the guilt
of history. At this level symbols have not only an expressive value, as
they do on the merely semantic level, but a heuristic value, since they
confer universality, temporality and ontological import upon our
self-understanding. Interpretation therefore does not consist simply in
extricating the
second
ORDINAL
intention, which is both given and masked in the literal meaning; it
tries to thematize this universality, this temporality, this ontological
exploration implied in myth. Thus, in their mythical form symbols
themselves push toward speculative expression; symbols themselves are
the dawn of reflection. The hermeneutic problem therefore is not imposed
upon reflection from without, but proposed from within by the very
movement of meaning, by the implicit life of symbols taken at their
semantic and mythical level.
There is a
third
ORDINAL
way in which the symbolism of evil calls for a science of
interpretation, a hermeneutics. Semantically as well as mythically, the
symbols of evil are always the obverse side of a greater symbolism, a
symbolism of salvation. This is already true on the semantic level: to
the impure there corresponds the pure; to the wandering of sin
corresponds pardon in its symbol of the return; to the weight of sin,
deliverance; and, more generally, to the symbolism of slavery, that of
liberation. It is even clearer on the mythical level; the images of the
beginning receive their true meaning from the images of the end. The
symbolism of chaos constitutes the preface of a poem that celebrates the
enthroning of Marduk; to the tragic god corresponds the purification of
Apollo
ORG
, the same
Apollo
ORG
who through his oracle called
Socrates
LOC
to “examine” other men; to the myth of the soul in exile corresponds
the symbolism of deliverance through knowledge; to the figure of the
first
Adam
PERSON
correspond the successive figures of the King, the Messiah, the Just One who
suffers,
the Son of Man
WORK_OF_ART
, the Lord, the Logos. The philosopher, qua philosopher, has nothing to
say concerning the proclamation, the apostolic kerygma, according to
which these figures are brought to fulfillment in the coming of
the Christ Jesus
ORG
; but he can and should reflect upon these symbols insofar as they are
representations of the end of evil. What, then, does this one-to-one
correspondence between the
two
CARDINAL
symbolisms signify? It signifies,
first
ORDINAL
, that the symbolism of evil receives its true meaning from the
symbolism of salvation. The symbolism of evil is only a particular
province within religious symbolism; thus
the Christian Credo
ORG
does not say “I believe in sin,” but “I believe in the remission of
sins.” More fundamentally, however, the correspondence between a
symbolism of evil and a symbolism of salvation signifies that we must
cease being totally absorbed in a symbolism of evil that is severed from
the rest of the symbolic and mythic universe and reflect upon the
totality formed by these symbols of the beginning and the end.
Thereby
ORG
is suggested the architectonic task of reason, which has already been
sketched in the interplay of the mythic correspondences; it is this
totality, as such, which demands expression at the level of reflection
and speculation.
Symbols themselves demand this speculative
reflection. An interpretation of symbols that extricated their
philosophical meaning would not be something superadded to them. Such an
interpretation is required by the semantic structure of symbols, by the
latent speculation of myths, and finally by the fact that each symbol
belongs to a meaningful totality which furnishes the
first
ORDINAL
schema of the system.
Though we do not yet know what privileged
place <3> the symbols and myths of evil have within the empire of
symbolism, we will here try to pose the problem in its full generality
by asking the question:
<3> In giving precedence to the
problem of method, we reduce the entire symbolism of evil to the rank of
an example. We shall not regret doing so:
one
CARDINAL
of the results of reflection will be precisely that the symbolism of evil is not
one
CARDINAL
example out of many but a privileged example, perhaps even the native
land of all symbolism, the birthplace of the hermeneutic conflict taken
in its full extent. But this we shall understand only through the
movement of reflection—a reflection that at
first
ORDINAL
knows the symbols of evil merely as a given or arbitrarily chosen example.
How can a philosophy of reflection nourish itself at the symbolic source and become hermeneutic?
It must be admitted that the question seems quite perplexing. Traditionally—since
Plato
PERSON
, that is—it is put in the following terms: What is the place of myth in
philosophy? If myth calls for philosophy, is it true that philosophy
calls for myth? Or, in the terms of the present work, does reflection
call for symbols and the interpretation of symbols? This question
precedes any attempt to move from mythical symbols to speculative
symbols, whatever the symbolic area being dealt with. One must
first
ORDINAL
make sure that the philosophic act, in its innermost nature, not only
does not exclude, but requires something like an interpretation.
At
first
ORDINAL
sight the question seems hopeless. Philosophy, born in
Greece
GPE
, introduced new demands in contrast to mythical thought;
first
ORDINAL
and foremost it established the idea of a science, in the sense of the
Platonic
ORG
episteme or the
Wissenschaft
PRODUCT
of
German
NORP
idealism. In view of this idea of philosophical science, the recourse to symbols has something scandalous about it.
In the
first
ORDINAL
place, symbols remain caught within the diversity of languages and
cultures and espouse their irreducible singularity. Why begin with the
Babylonians
NORP
, the
Hebrews
FAC
, the
Greeks
PERSON
—be they tragic or
Pythagorean
NORP
? Because they nourish my memory? In that case I put my singularity at
the center of my reflection; but does not philosophical science require
that the singularity of cultural creations and individual memories be
reabsorbed into the universality of discourse?
Secondly
ORDINAL
, philosophy as a rigorous science seems to require univocal
significations. But symbols, by reason of their analogical texture, are
opaque, nontransparent; the double meaning that gives them concrete
roots weights them down with materiality. This double meaning is not
accidental but constitutive, inasmuch as the analogous sense, the
existential sense, is given only in and through the literal sense; in
epistemological terms, this opacity can only mean equivocity. Can
philosophy systematically cultivate the equivocal?
Thirdly
ORDINAL
, and this is the most serious point, the bond between symbol and interpretation, in which we have seen the promise of an
organic
connection between mythos and logos, furnishes a new motive for
suspicion. Any interpretation can be revoked; no myths without exegesis,
but no exegesis without contesting. The deciphering of enigmas is not a
science, either in the
Platonic
PRODUCT
,
Hegelian
ORG
, or modern sense of the word “science.” Our preceding chapter gave a
glimpse of the gravity of the problem: there we considered the most
extreme opposition imaginable within the field of hermeneutics, the
opposition between the phenomenology of religion, conceived as a
remythicizing of discourse, and psychoanalysis, conceived as a
demystification of discourse. By the same token our problem becomes
graver in becoming more precise. The question now is not simply why an
interpretation, but why these opposed interpretations? The task is not
only to justify the recourse to some kind of interpretation, but to
justify the dependence of reflection upon preconstituted hermeneutics
that are mutually exclusive.
To justify the recourse to symbols
in philosophy is ultimately to justify cultural contingency, equivocal
language, and the war of hermeneutics within itself.
The solution
of the problem hinges on showing that reflection, in principle,
requires something like interpretation; starting from that requirement
one can then justify, also in principle, the detour through the
contingency of cultures, through an incurably equivocal language, and
through the conflict of interpretations.
Let us begin at the
beginning. Up to the present we have only been considering the recourse
of symbols to reflection; what makes that recourse intelligible is
reflection’s recourse to symbols.
THE RECOURSE OF REFLECTION
TO SYMBOLS
When we say’philosophy is reflection we mean, assuredly, self-reflection. But what does the
Self
ORG
signify? Do we know it any better than the words symbol and
interpretation? No doubt we do, but with a knowledge that is abstract,
empty, and vain. Let us start, then, by taking stock of this vain
certitude. Perhaps it is symbolism that will save reflection from its
vanity, while at the same time reflection will provide the structure for
handling any hermeneutic conflict. Therefore, what does
Reflection
ORG
signify? What does
the Self of self-reflection
ORG
signify?
I assume here that the positing of the self is the
first
ORDINAL
truth for the philosopher placed within that broad tradition of modern philosophy that begins with
Descartes
PERSON
and is developed in
Kant
PERSON
,
Fichte
PERSON
, and the reflective stream of
European
NORP
philosophy. For this tradition, which we shall consider as a whole
before setting its main representatives in opposition to one another,
the positing of the self is a truth which posits itself; it can be
neither verified nor deduced; it is at once the positing of a being and
of an act; the positing of an existence and of an operation of thought: /
am, I think; to exist, for me, is to think; I exist inasmuch as I
think. Since this truth cannot be verified like a fact, nor deduced like
a conclusion, it has to posit itself in reflection; its self-positing
is reflection;
Fichte
PERSON
called this
first
ORDINAL
truth the thetic judgment. Such is our philosophical starting point.
But this
first
ORDINAL
reference of reflection to the positing of the self, as existing and
thinking, does not sufficiently characterize reflection. In particular,
we do not yet understand why reflection requires a work of deciphering,
an exegesis, and a science of exegesis or hermeneutics, and still less
why this deciphering must be either a psychoanalysis or a phenomenology
of the sacred. This point cannot be understood so long as reflection is
seen as a return to the so-called evidence of immediate consciousness.
We have to introduce a
second
ORDINAL
trait of reflection, which may be stated thus: reflection is not
intuition; or, in positive terms, reflection is the effort to recapture
the Ego of the
Ego Cogito
PERSON
in the mirror of its objects, its works, its acts. But why must the
positing of the Ego be recaptured through its acts? Precisely because it
is given neither in a psychological evidence, nor in an intellectual
intuition, nor in a mystical vision. A reflective philosophy is the
contrary of a philosophy of the immediate. The
first
ORDINAL
truth—l am, l think—remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible;
it has to be “mediated” by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and
monuments that objectify it. It is in these objects, in the widest sense
of the word, that the Ego must lose and find itself. We can say, in a
somewhat paradoxical sense, that a philosophy of reflection is not a
philosophy of consciousness, if by
consciousness we mean
immediate self-consciousness. Consciousness, as we shall say later, is a
task, but it is a task because it is not a given . . . No doubt I have
an apperception of myself and my acts, and this apperception is a type
of evidence. Descartes cannot be dislodged from this incontestable
proposition: I cannot doubt myself without perceiving that I doubt. But
what does this apperception signify? A certitude, certainly, but a
certitude devoid of truth. As
Malebranche
GPE
well understood, in opposition to
Descartes
PERSON
, this immediate grasp is only a feeling and not an idea. If ideas are
light and vision, there is no vision of the Ego, nor light in
apperception. I only sense that I exist and that I think; I sense that I
am awake; such is apperception. In
Kantian
GPE
language, an apperception of the Ego may accompany all my
representations, but this apperception is not knowledge of oneself, it
cannot be transformed into an intuition of a substantial soul; the
decisive critique Kant directs against any “rational psychology” has
definitively dissociated reflection from any so-called knowledge of
self.
This
second
ORDINAL
thesis, that reflection is not intuition, enables us to glimpse the
place interpretation has in the knowledge of oneself; that place is
indirectly indicated by the difference between reflection and intuition.
A new step will bring us closer to the goal. Having opposed reflection and intuition to
one
CARDINAL
another, with Kant and in opposition to
Descartes
PERSON
, I would like to distinguish the task of reflection from a mere
critique of knowledge; this new step leads us away from Kant in the
direction of
Fichte
PERSON
and
Nabert
PERSON
. The basic limitation of a critical philosophy lies in its exclusive
concern for epistemology; reflection is reduced to a single dimension:
the only canonical operations of thought are those that ground the
“objectivity” of our representations. This priority given to
epistemology explains why in Kant, in spite of appearances, the
practical philosophy is subordinated to the critical philosophy: the
second
ORDINAL
critique, that of practical reason, in fact borrows all of its structures from the
first
ORDINAL
, that of pure reason. A single question rules the critical philosophy:
What is a priori and what is merely empirical in knowledge? This
distinction is the key
2
CARDINAL
. In
Husserlian
GPE
language: the
Ego Cogito
PERSON
is apodictic, but not necessarily adequate.
to the theory of objectivity; it is purely and simply transposed into the
second
ORDINAL
critique; the objectivity of the maxims of the will rests on the
distinction between the validity of duty, which is a priori, and the
content of empirical desires. It is in opposition to this reduction of
reflection to a simple critique that I say, with
Fichte
PERSON
and his
French
NORP
successor,
Jean Nabert
PERSON
, that reflection is not so much a justification of science and duty as a
reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemology is only a part of
this broader task: we have to recover the act of existing, the positing
of the self, in all the density of its works. Why must this recovery be
characterized as appropriation and even as reappropriation? I must
recover something which has
first
ORDINAL
been lost; I make “proper to me” what has ceased being mine. I make
“mine” what I am separated from by space or time, by distraction or
“diversion,” or because of some culpable forgetfulness. Appropriation
signifies that the initial situation from which reflection proceeds is
“forgetfulness.” I am lost, “led astray” among objects and separated
from the center of my existence, just as I am separated from others and
as an enemy is separated from all men. Whatever the secret of this
“diaspora,” of this separation, it signifies that I do not at
first
ORDINAL
possess what I am. The truth that
Fichte
PERSON
called the thetic judgment posits itself in a desert wherein I am absent to myself. That is why reflection is a task, an
Aufgabe
GPE
—the task of making my concrete experience equal to the positing of “I
am.” Such is the ultimate elaboration of our initial proposition that
reflection is not intuition; we now say: the positing of self is not
given, it is a task, it is not gegeben, but aufgegeben.
At this
point one may wonder whether we have not overly stressed the practical
and ethical side of reflection. Is this not a new limitation, like that
of the epistemological stream of the
Kantian
PERSON
philosophy? Moreover, are we not farther than ever from our problem of
interpretation? I do not think so; the ethical stress put on reflection
does not mark a limitation, if we take the notion of ethical in its wide
sense, as in
Spinoza
GPE
, when he calls the total process of philosophy “ethical.
”
WORK_OF_ART
Philosophy is ethical to the extent that it leads from alienation to
freedom and beatitude. In Spinoza this conversion is achieved when the
knowledge of self is made equal to the knowledge of the unique
substance;
but this speculative process has an ethical significance, inasmuch as
the alienated individual is transformed by the knowledge of the whole.
Philosophy is ethics, but ethics is not simply morality. If we follow
Spinoza
PERSON
’s use of the word “ethical” we must say that reflection is ethical
before becoming a critique of morality. Its goal is to grasp the Ego in
its effort to exist, in its desire to be. This is where a reflective
philosophy recovers and perhaps also saves the
Platonic
ORG
notion that the source of knowledge is itself
Eros
LOC
, desire, love, along with the
Spinozistic
NORP
notion that it is conatus, effort. Such effort is a desire, since it is
never satisfied; but the desire is an effort since it is the
affirmative positing of a singular being and not simply a lack of being.
Effort and desire are the
two
CARDINAL
sides of this positing of the self in the
first
ORDINAL
truth: I am.
We are now in a position to complete our negative proposition— reflection is not intuition—by a positive proposition:
Reflection
PERSON
is the appropriation of our effort to exist and of our desire to be,
through the works which bear witness to that effort and desire. That is
why reflection is more than a mere critique of knowledge and even more
than a mere critique of moral judgment; prior to every critique of
judgment it reflects upon the act of existing that we deploy in effort
and desire.
This
third
ORDINAL
step leads us to the threshold of our problem of interpretation: the
positing or emergence of this effort or desire is not only devoid of all
intuition but is evidenced only by works whose meaning remains doubtful
and revocable. This is where reflection calls for an interpretation and
tends to move into hermeneutics. The ultimate root of our problem lies
in this primitive connection between the act of existing and the signs
we deploy in our works; reflection must become interpretation because I
cannot grasp the act of existing except in signs scattered in the world.
That is why a reflective philosophy must include the results, methods,
and presuppositions of all the sciences that try to decipher and
interpret the signs of man.
Such is, in its principle and widest generality, the root of the hermeneutic problem. The problem is posed both by
the factual
3
DATE
.
Cf
PERSON
. my article “
Acte
GPE
et signe dans la philosophic
de Jean Nabert
PERSON
,” Etudes philosophiques (
1962-63
DATE
).
existence of symbolic language which calls for reflection
and, conversely, by the indigence of reflection which calls for
interpretation. In positing itself, reflection understands its own
inability to transcend the vain and empty abstraction of the l think and
the necessity to recover itself by deciphering its own signs lost in
the world of culture. Thus reflection realizes it does not begin as
science; in order to operate it must take to itself the opaque,
contingent, and equivocal signs scattered in the cultures in which our
language is rooted.
REFLECTION AND EQUIVOCAL LANGUAGE
By
thus placing the hermeneutic problem within the movement of reflection
we are enabled to meet the objections that would seemingly invalidate a
philosophy that presents itself as a hermeneutics. In the foregoing we
have reduced these objections to
three
CARDINAL
main ones: Can philosophy derive its universality from contingent
cultural productions? Can it build its rigor upon equivocal
significations? Can it subject its vow of coherence to the fluctuations
of an indecisive conflict between rival interpretations?
The aim
of these introductory chapters is not so much to resolve the problems as
to show their legitimacy when they are rightly posed, to assure
ourselves that they are not meaningless but are inscribed in the nature
of things and in the nature of language. That philosophical discourse
achieves universality only by passing through the contingency of
cultures, that its rigor is dependent upon equivocal languages, that its
coherence must traverse the war between hermeneutics—all this can and
must be seen as the necessary pathway, as the triple aporia rightly
formed and rightly posed. At
the end of this first
DATE
series of investigations, deliberately called
a “Problematic
LAW
,”
one
CARDINAL
point should be assured: the aporias of interpretation are those of reflection itself.
I will say very little here about the
first
ORDINAL
difficulty, since I have discussed it in the introduction to
The Symbolism of Evil
WORK_OF_ART
. To start from a
pregiven
CARDINAL
symbolism, I objected, is to give oneself something
to think about; but at the same time a radical contingency is brought into discourse, the contingency of the cultures of
one
CARDINAL
’s acquaintance. My answer was that the philosopher does not speak from
nowhere: every question he can pose rises from the depths of his
Greek
NORP
memory; the field of his investigation is thereby unavoidably oriented;
his memory carries with it the opposition of the “near” and the “far.”
Through this contingency of historical encounters we have to discern
reasonable sequences between scattered cultural themes. I should now add
that it is only abstract reflection which speaks from nowhere. To
become concrete, reflection must lose its immediate pretension to
universality, to the extent of fusing together its essential necessity
and the contingency of the signs through which it recognizes itself.
This fusion can be achieved precisely in the movement of interpretation.
We
must now come to grips with the more formidable objection, that the
recourse to symbolism hands thought over to equivocal language and
fallacious arguments that are condemned by a sound logic. The difficulty
in avoiding this objection is increased by the fact that logicians have
invented symbolic logic with the express aim of eliminating
equivocation from our arguments. For the logician, the word “symbol”
means precisely the contrary of what it means for us. The important
status of symbolic logic obliges us to say something about this
encounter, which at the very least constitutes a strange homonymy; the
obligation is all the more pressing in view of the fact that we have
constantly alluded to the duality of univocal and equivocal expressions
and have implicitly assumed that the latter can have an irreplaceable
philosophical function.
The only radical way to justify
hermeneutics is to seek in the very nature of reflective thought the
principle of a logic of double meaning, a logic that is complex but not
arbitrary, rigorous in its articulations but irreducible to the
linearity of symbolic logic. This logic is no longer a formal logic, but
a transcendental logic established on the level of the conditions of
possibility; not the conditions of objectivity of nature, but the
conditions of the appropriation of our desire to be. Thus the logic of
double meanings, which is proper to hermeneutics, is of a transcendental
order.
We have now to establish this connection between the logic of double meaning and transcendental reflection.
If
the advocate of hermeneutics does not carry the discussion to this
level, he will soon be driven into an untenable position. Any effort to
maintain the debate on the level of the semantic structure of symbols
will be to no purpose. He may of course appeal, as we ourselves have
done up to now, to the overdetermination of meaning in symbols and thus
defend a theory of
two
CARDINAL
types of symbolism whose respective fields of application must be kept from any overlapping.
But the idea that there can exist
two
CARDINAL
logics on the same level is strictly untenable; a pure and simple
juxtaposition can only lead to the elimination of hermeneutics by
symbolic logic.
For what advantages can the hermeneutician adduce
when faced with formal logic? To the artificiality of logical symbols,
which can be written and read but not spoken, he will oppose an
essentially oral symbolism, in each instance received and accepted as a
heritage. The man who speaks in symbols is
first
ORDINAL
of all a narrator; he transmits an abundance of meaning over which he
has little command. This abundance, this density of manifold meaning, is
what gives him food for thought and solicits his understanding;
interpretation consists less in suppressing ambiguity than in
understanding it and in explicating its richness. It may also be said
that logical symbolism is empty, whereas symbolism in hermeneutics is
full; it renders manifest the double meaning of worldly or psychical
reality. This was suggested earlier when we said that symbols are bound:
the sensible sign is bound by the symbolic meaning that dwells in it
and gives it transparency and lightness; the symbolic meaning is in turn
bound to its sensible vehicle, which gives it weight and opacity. One
might add that this is also the way symbols bind us, viz. by giving
thought a content, a flesh, a density.
These distinctions and
oppositions are not false; they are merely unfounded. A confrontation
which restricts itself to the symbolic texture of symbols and does not
face the question of their foundation in reflection will soon prove
embarrassing to the advocate of hermeneutics. For the artificiality and
emptiness of logical symbolism are simply the counterpart and condition
of the true aim of this logic, viz. to guarantee the nonambiguity of
arguments; what the hermeneutician calls double meaning is, in logical
terms, ambi-
guity, i.e. equivocity of words and amphiboly of
statements. A peaceful juxtaposition of hermeneutics and symbolic logic
is therefore impossible; symbolic logic quickly makes any lazy
compromise untenable. Its very “intolerance” forces hermeneutics to
radically justify its own language.
We must therefore understand this intolerance in order to arrive a contrario at the foundation of hermeneutics.
If
the rigor of symbolic logic seems more exclusive than that of
traditional formal logic, the reason is that symbolic logic is not a
simple prolongation of the earlier logic. It does not represent a higher
degree of formalization; it proceeds from a global decision concerning
ordinary language as a whole; it marks a split with ordinary language
and its incurable ambiguity; it questions the equivocal and hence
fallacious character of the words of ordinary language, the amphibolous
character of its constructions, the confusion inherent in metaphor and
idiomatic expressions, the emotional resonance of highly descriptive
language.
Symbolic
PERSON
logic despairs of natural language precisely at the point where hermeneutics believes in its implicit “wisdom.”
This
struggle begins with the exclusion from the properly cognitive sphere
of all language that does not give factual information. The rest of
discourse is classified under the heading of the emotive and hortatory
functions of language; that which does not give factual information
expresses emotions, feelings, or attitudes, or urges others to behave in
some particular way.
Reduced thus to the informative function,
language still has to be divested of the equivocity of words and the
amphiboly of grammatical constructions; verbal ambiguity must be
unmasked so as to eliminate it from arguments and to employ coherently
the same words in the same sense within the same argument. The function
of definition is to explain meaning and thereby eliminate ambiguity: the
only definitions that succeed in doing this are scientific ones. These
are not content with pointing out the meaning words already have in
usage, independently of their definition; instead they very strictly
characterize an object in light of a scientific theory (for example, the
definition of force as the product of mass and acceleration in the
context of
Newtonian
NORP
theory).
But symbolic logic goes further. For it, the price of
univocity is the creation of a symbolism with no ties to natural
language. This notion of symbol excludes the other notion of symbol. The
recourse to a completely artificial symbolism introduces in logic a
difference not only of degree but of nature; the symbols of the logician
intervene precisely at the point where the arguments of classical
logic, formulated in ordinary language, run into an invincible and, in a
way, residual ambiguity. Thus the logical disjunction sign v eliminates
the ambiguity of words that express disjunction in ordinary language
(Eng., or;
Ger
PERSON
., oder;
Fr
GPE
., ou); v expresses only the partial meaning common to the inclusive disjunction (the sense of the
Latin
NORP
vel) according to which
at least one
CARDINAL
of the terms of the disjunction is true although both may be true, and to the exclusive disjunction (the sense of the
Latin
NORP
aut) according to which
at least one
CARDINAL
is true and
at least one
CARDINAL
is false; v resolves the ambiguity by formulating the inclusive disjunction as the part common to the
two
CARDINAL
modes of disjunction. Likewise the symbol
3
CARDINAL
resolves the ambiguity inherent in the notion of implication (which may
denote formal implication, either logical, definitional, or causal);
the symbol
3
CARDINAL
formulates the common partial meaning, namely, that any hypothetical
statement with a true antecedent and a false consequent must be false;
the symbol is thus an abbreviation of a longer symbolism which expresses
the negation of the conjunction of the truth value of the antecedent
and the falsity of the consequent: ~(p • ~
q)-
DATE
Thus the artificial language of logical symbolism enables
one
CARDINAL
to determine the validity of arguments in all cases where a residual
ambiguity can be ascribed to the structure of ordinary language. The
precise point where symbolic logic cuts across and contests
hermeneutics, therefore, is this: verbal equivocity and syntactical
amphiboly—in short, the ambiguity of ordinary language—can be overcome
only at the level of a language whose symbols have a meaning completely
determined by the truth table whose construction they allow. Thus the
sense of the symbol v is completely determined by its truth function,
inasmuch as it serves to safeguard the validity of the disjunctive
syllogism; likewise the sense of the symbol
3
CARDINAL
completely exhausts its meaning in the construction of the
truth
table of the hypothetical syllogism. These constructions guarantee that
the symbols are completely unambiguous, while the nonambiguity of the
symbols assures the universal validity of arguments.
As long as
the logic of multiple meaning is not grounded in its reflective
function, it necessarily falls under the blows of formal and symbolic
logic. In the eyes of the logician, hermeneutics will always be
suspected of fostering a culpable complacency toward equivocal meanings,
of surreptitiously giving an informative function to expressions that
have merely an emotive or hortatory function. Hermeneutics thus falls
under the fallacies of relevance which a sound logic denounces.
The
only thing that can come to the aid of equivocal expressions and truly
ground a logic of double meaning is the problematic of reflection. The
only thing that can justify equivocal expressions is their a priori role
in the movement of self-appropriation by self which constitutes
reflective activity. This a priori function pertains not to a formal but
to a transcendental logic, if by transcendental logic is meant the
establishing of the conditions of possibility of a domain of objectivity
in general. The task of such a logic is to extricate by a regressive
method the notions presupposed in the constitution of a type of
experience and a corresponding type of reality.
Transcendental
GPE
logic is not exhausted in the
Kantian
NORP
a priori. The connection we have established between reflection upon
the I think, I am qua act, and the signs scattered in the various
cultures of that act of existing, opens up a new field of experience,
objectivity, and reality. This is the field to which the logic of double
meaning pertains—a logic we have qualified above as complex but not
arbitrary, and rigorous in its articulations. The principle of a
limitation to the demands of symbolic logic lies in the structure of
reflection itself. If there is no such thing as the transcendental,
there is no reply to the intolerance of symbolic logic; but if the
transcendental is an authentic dimension of discourse, then new force is
found in the reasons that can be opposed to the requirement of logicism
that all discourse be measured by its treatise of arguments. These
reasons, which seemed to us to be left hanging in air for want of a
foundation, are as follows:
1
CARDINAL
. The requirement of univocity holds only for discourse that presents
itself as argument: but reflection does not argue, it draws no
conclusion, it neither deduces nor induces; it states the conditions of
possibility whereby empirical consciousness can be made equal to thetic
consciousness. Hence, “equivocal” applies only to those expressions that
ought to be univocal in the course of a single “argument” but are not;
in the reflective use of multiple-meaning symbols there is no fallacy of
ambiguity: to reflect upon these symbols and to interpret them is
one
CARDINAL
and the same act.
2
CARDINAL
. The understanding developed by reflection upon symbols is not a weak
substitute for definition, for reflection is not a type of thinking that
defines and thinks according to “classes.” This brings us back to the
Aristotelian
NORP
problem of the “many meanings of being.”
Aristotle
GPE
was the
first
ORDINAL
to see clearly that philosophical discourse is not subject to the
logical alternative of univocal-equivocal, for being is not a “genus”;
and yet, being is said; but it “is said in many ways.”
3
CARDINAL
. Let us go back to the very
first
ORDINAL
alternative considered above: a statement that does not give factual
information, we said, expresses only the emotions or attitudes of a
subject.
Reflection
PERSON
, however, falls outside this alternative; that which makes possible the
appropriation of the I think, I am is neither the empirical statement
nor the emotive statement, but something other than either of these.
This
case for interpretation rests entirely on the reflective function of
interpretative thought. If the double movement of symbols toward
reflection and of reflection toward symbols is valid, interpretative
thought is well grounded. Hence it may be said, at least negatively,
that such thought is not measured by a logic of arguments; the validity
of philosophical statements cannot be arbitrated by a theory of language
conceived as syntax; the semantics of philosophy is not swallowed up by
a symbolic logic.
These propositions concerning philosophic
discourse do not enable us, however, to say positively what a
philosophical statement is; such an affirmation could be fully justified
only by its actually being said. At least we can affirm that the
indirect, symbolic lan-
guage of reflection can be valid, not because it is equivocal, but in spite of its being equivocal.
REFLECTION AND THE
HERMENEUTIC CONFLICT
But
the reply of hermeneutics to the objections of symbolic logic is liable
to be an empty victory. The challenge comes not only from without, it
is not only the voice of the “intolerant” logician; it comes from
within, from the internal inconsistency of hermeneutics, torn by
contradiction. As we already know, not one but several interpretations
have to be integrated into reflection. Thus the hermeneutic conflict
itself is what nourishes the process of reflection and governs the
movement from abstract to concrete reflection. Is this possible without
“destroying” reflection?
In our attempt to justify the recourse
to hermeneutics that are already constituted—that of the phenomenology
of religion and that of psychoanalysis—we suggested that their conflict
might well be not only a crisis of language but, deeper still, a crisis
of reflection: to destroy the idols, to listen to symbols—are not these,
we asked, one and the same enterprise? Indeed, the profound unity of
the demystifying and the remythicizing of discourse can be seen only at
the end of an ascesis of reflection, in the course of which the debate
dramatizing the hermeneutic field shall have become a discipline of
thinking.
One
CARDINAL
trait of this discipline is already clear to us: the
two
CARDINAL
enterprises which we at
first
ORDINAL
opposed to one another—the reduction of illusions and the restoration
of the fullness of meaning—are alike in that they both shift the origin
of meaning to another center which is no longer the immediate subject of
reflection: “consciousness”—the watchful ego, attentive to its own
presence, anxious about self and attached to self. Thus hermeneutics,
approached from its most opposed poles, represents a challenge and a
test for reflection, whose
first
ORDINAL
tendency is to identify itself with immediate consciousness. To let
ourselves be torn by the contradiction between these divergent
hermeneutics is to give ourselves up to the wonder
that puts
reflection in motion: it is no doubt necessary for us to be separated
from ourselves, to be set off center, in order finally to know what is
signified by the / think, I am.
We thought we had resolved the
antinomy of myth and philosophy by appealing to interpretation itself
for the mediation between myth and philosophy or, in a broader sense,
between symbols and reflection. But that mediation is not given, it is
to be constructed.
It is not given like a ready-made solution.
The dispossession of the ego, which psychoanalysis more than any other
hermeneutics demands of us, is the
first
ORDINAL
achievement of reflection that reflection does not understand. But the
phenomenological interpretation of the sacred, to which psychoanalysis
seems to be diametrically opposed, is no less foreign to the style and
fundamental intention of the reflective method; does it not oppose a
method of transcendence to the method of immanence of reflective
philosophy? Does not the sacred, manifested in its symbols, seem to
pertain to revelation rather than to reflection? Whether
one
CARDINAL
looks back to the will to power of the
Nietzschean
NORP
man, to the generic being of the
Marxist
NORP
man, to the libido of the
Freudian
NORP
man, or whether
one
CARDINAL
looks ahead to the transcendent home of signification which we
designate here by the vague term the “sacred,” the home of meaning is
not consciousness but something other than consciousness.
Both
hermeneutics pose therefore the same crucial question: Can the
dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of meaning
be understood as an act of reflection, as the
first
ORDINAL
gesture of reappropriation? This is the question that remains in
suspense; it is more radical than the question of the coexistence of
several styles of interpretation, or the whole crisis of language in
which the hermeneutic conflict is set.
We suspect that these
three
CARDINAL
“crises”—crisis of language, crisis of interpretation, crisis of
reflection—can only be overcome together. In order to become concrete,
i.e. equal to its richest contents, reflection must become hermeneutic;
but there exists no general hermeneutics. This aporia sets us in
movement: would it not be one and the same thing to arbitrate the war of
hermeneutics and to enlarge reflection to the dimensions of a critique
of interpretations? Is it not by
one
CARDINAL
and the same movement that reflection can become
concrete
reflection and that the rivalry between interpretations can be
comprehended, in the double sense of the term: justified by reflection
and embodied in its work?
For the moment our perplexity is great. What is offered to us is a
three
CARDINAL
-term relation, a figure with
three
CARDINAL
heads: reflection, interpretation understood as restoration of meaning,
interpretation understood as reduction of illusion. No doubt we shall
have to penetrate quite deeply into the conflict between interpretations
before we see appear, as a requirement of the very war of hermeneutics,
the means of grounding the
three
CARDINAL
together in reflection. But in its turn reflection will no longer be
the positing, as feeble as it is peremptory, as sterile as it is
irrefutable, of the
1
CARDINAL
think, I am: it will have become concrete reflection; and its concreteness will be due to the harsh hermeneutic discipline.
BOOK II
Analytic: Reading of
Freud
Introduction
FAC
How to Read Freud
Before entering
my “Essay to Understand Freud
PRODUCT
” I would like to explain how it was written and how it should be read.
What
I propose is not an interpretation on a single level but rather a
series of readings each of which is both completed and corrected by the
following one. Because of the great distance between the
first
ORDINAL
and last readings it may seem that the initial interpretation has been
retracted, but such is not the case. Each reading is essential and must
be preserved.
Let me explain what I mean by this procedure. I will
first
ORDINAL
say something about the
two
CARDINAL
main divisions of this study, which I have called an “
Analytic
NORP
” and a “
Dialectic
NORP
,” and then about the movement of the “
Analytic
NORP
” itself.
1
CARDINAL
. With a view toward a dialectic between conflicting hermeneutics, I
first
ORDINAL
wrote a separate study dealing solely with the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation. I call this separate interpretation an
Analytic
NORP
because of the mechanical and external nature of its opposition to all the other interpretations. How is the
Analytic
NORP
, taken as a whole, connected with the
Dialectic
NORP
?
The relation between the
Analytic
NORP
and the
Dialectic
NORP
answers to the central difficulty raised in the
Problematic
NORP
. In my introductory presentation of
Freud
ORG
I regarded him, along with
Marx
PERSON
and
Nietzsche
ORG
, as
one
CARDINAL
of the representatives of reductive and demystifying hermeneutics. In this view I was guided by a taste for extremes; I saw
Freud
ORG
as having a precise place in the hermeneutic debate, opposed to a
nonreductive and restorative hermeneutics, and in league with other
thinkers who wage a combat comparable to his. The whole movement of this
book consists in a gradual readjusting
of that initial position
and of the panoramic view of the battlefield governing it. In the end
it may seem that in this indecisive combat
Freud
ORG
is nowhere because he is everywhere. That impression is correct: the
limits of psychoanalysis will finally have to be conceived not so much
as a frontier beyond which exist other points of view, rival or allied,
but rather as the imaginary line of a front of investigation which
constantly advances, while the other points of view filter through the
dividing line. In the beginning,
Freud
ORG
is
one
CARDINAL
combatant among many; in the end, he shall have become the privileged
witness of the total combat, for all the opposition will be carried over
into him.
We will
first
ORDINAL
come across his allies, now no longer alongside him but within him. The issues raised by
Nietzsche
ORG
and
Marx
PERSON
will gradually be seen to rise to the heart of the
Freudian
NORP
question as questions of language, ethics, and culture. The
three
CARDINAL
interpretations of culture that we usually set side by side will
encroach upon one another, the question of each becoming the question of
the other.
But the greatest change in the course of these successive readings will concern
Freud
ORG
’s relationship to what is most opposed to him, namely, a hermeneutics of the sacred. I
first
ORDINAL
wanted to become involved in the liveliest opposition, in order to give
myself the widest range of thought. At the start, in an interpretation
of psychoanalysis completely governed by
Freud
ORG
’s own systematization, all opposition is external; psychoanalysis has
its “opposite” outside of itself. This first reading is necessary; it
serves as a discipline of reflection; it brings about the dispossession
of consciousness and governs the ascesis of that narcissism that wishes
to be taken for the true
Cogito
PERSON
. Hence this reading and its harsh schooling will not be retracted but rather preserved in the final reading. It is only in a
second
ORDINAL
reading, that of our “
Dialectic
NORP
,” that the external and completely mechanical opposition between the
contending points of view can be converted into an internal opposition,
with each point of view becoming in a way its opposite and bearing
within itself the grounds of the contrary point of view.
The basic reason for not going directly to the dialectical view lies in our concern for a discipline of thought.
First
ORDINAL
we must do justice
to each point of view separately; we must
adopt, so to speak, their instructive exclusiveness. Next we must
account for their opposition; we must do away with convenient
eclecticisms and posit all the oppositions as external. We will try to
maintain this discipline of thought; hence we will enter psychoanalysis
from its most demanding side, its systematization, which
Freud
ORG
called his “metapsychology.”
2
CARDINAL
. But our “Analytic” is not a self-enclosed reading on a single level;
from the beginning it is oriented toward a more dialectical view,
according to the movement from the more abstract to the more concrete
that sustains the series of readings. I use the word “abstract” not in
the vague and improper sense, according to which an idea is abstract
when it is without basis in experience, detached from facts, “purely
theoretical,” but in the precise and proper sense. The topographic
theory and its conjoined economics are not abstract in the sense of
being remote from the facts. In the sciences of man, “theory” grounds
the facts; the “facts” of psychoanalysis are set up by the theory—in
Freudian
LANGUAGE
language, by the “metapsychology”; theory and facts can only be confirmed or invalidated together.
In what sense, then, is the
Freudian
NORP
“topography” abstract? In the sense that it does not account for the
intersubjective nature of the dramas forming its main theme. Whether it
be the drama of the parental relation or the drama of the therapeutic
relation itself, in which the other situations achieve speech, what
nourishes analysis is always a debate between consciousnesses. Moreover,
in the
Freudian
NORP
topography that debate is projected onto a representation of the
psychical apparatus in which only the “vicissitudes of instincts” within
an isolated psychism are thematized. Stated bluntly, the
Freudian
NORP
systematization is solipsistic, whereas the situations and relations
analysis speaks of and which speak in analysis are intersubjective.
Therein lies the abstract character of the first reading we propose in
Part I of the “
Analytic
NORP
.” That is why the topography, adopted at
first
ORDINAL
as a necessary discipline, will gradually come to be seen as a
provisional level of reference which will not be abandoned but surpassed
and retained. Gradually, within the “
Analytic
NORP
” itself, the reading of
Freud
ORG
will become enriched and inverted into its contrary, until the moment is reached when it will speak at times in the manner of
Hegel
GPE
.
The main stages of the movement that carries the
Analytic
NORP
toward its
Dialectic
NORP
are as follows. In a
first
ORDINAL
cycle, entitled
“Energetics and Hermeneutics
WORK_OF_ART
,” we will set forth the basic concepts of analytical interpretation.
This study, properly epistemological in nature, will center on the
metapsychological papers of
the years 1914-17
DATE
; in the investigation we will be guided by
one
CARDINAL
question: What is interpretation in psychoanalysis? This inquiry must
precede any study of cultural phenomena, for the rights of that
interpretation as well as its limits of validity depend exclusively upon
the solution of this epistemological problem. This
first
ORDINAL
group of chapters, which will follow fairly closely the historical order of the constitution of the
first
ORDINAL
topography (unconscious, preconscious, conscious) and the gradual
introduction of the economic explanation, will place us before an
apparent dilemma: by turns we will see psychoanalysis as an explanation
of psychical phenomena through conflicts of forces, hence as an
energetics; and as an exegesis of apparent meaning through a latent
meaning, hence as a hermeneutics. At issue in Part I will be the unity
of these
two
CARDINAL
manners of understanding; on the one hand we will see that the only
possible way for psychoanalysis to become “interpretation” is by
incorporating the economic point of view into a theory of meaning; on
the other hand the economic point of view will appear to us to be
irreducible to any other by reason of what we will call the
unsurpassable character of desire.
The
second
ORDINAL
cycle, entitled
“The Interpretation of Culture
WORK_OF_ART
,” will begin the movement by which
Freud
ORG
extends his central ideas to wider areas.
Freud
ORG
’s entire theory of culture may be regarded as a merely analogical
transposition of the economic explanation of dreams and the neuroses.
But the application of psychoanalysis to esthetic symbols, ideals, and
illusions will have repercussions calling for a revision of the initial
model and the schema of interpretation discussed in Part I. This
revision is expressed in the
second
ORDINAL
topography (ego, id, superego), which is added to the
first
ORDINAL
without suppressing it. New relations will be revealed, essentially those
concerned
with other persons, which only cultural situations and productions can
bring to light. In the course of these chapters, then, we will begin to
discover the abstract and especially the solipsistic character of the
first
ORDINAL
topography; this will prepare the way for a confrontation with the
Hegelian
NORP
exegesis of desire and of the reduplication of consciousness in self-consciousness, a topic that will occupy us in
the “Dialectic
ORG
.” Here too, however, dreams will be a model at once surpassed and
unsurpassable, like the emergence of desire in Part I; hence the theory
of illusion, at the end of Part II, will appear as a repetition of the
starting point at the peak of culture.
A third
CARDINAL
and last cycle will be concerned with the final reworking of the theory
of instincts under the sign of death. This new instinct theory is of
far-reaching significance. On the one hand it alone enables us to
complete the theory of culture by placing this theory within the field
of the struggle between
Eros
LOC
and Thanatos. By the same token it enables us to carry to its completion the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation of the reality principle, which functions throughout as
counterpole to the pleasure principle. However, in thus completing the
theories of culture and reality the new theory of instincts does not
limit itself to questioning the initial dream model: it upsets the
topographical starting point itself or, more precisely, the mechanistic
form in which the topography was
first
ORDINAL
stated. This mechanism, whose basic hypothesis about the functioning of
the physical apparatus we present at the beginning of Part I, was never
entirely eliminated from the later presentations of the topography; it
resists being integrated into an interpretation of meaning through
meaning and renders precarious the connection between energetics and
hermeneutics that we present in Part I; it is fundamentally challenged
only at the level of this final theory of instincts. But the paradox is
that the final development of the theory marks the return of
psychoanalysis to a sort of mythological philosophy, the emblems of
which are the figures of
Eros
LOC
,
Thanatos
ORG
, and
Ananke
PERSON
.
DATE
Thus our
Analytic
NORP
progresses, by successive self-surpassing, toward a
Dialectic
NORP
. That is why these chapters should be read as successive strata or
episodes in which understanding, by advancing from the abstract to the
concrete, changes meaning. On a
first
ORDINAL
and
more analytical reading,
Freudianism
NORP
reduces its opposition as something external to itself; on a
second
ORDINAL
and more dialectical reading, it embraces in a certain manner what it
seemed to exclude through reduction. I expressly ask the reader,
therefore, to suspend his judgment and to engage in moving from a
first
ORDINAL
understanding, which has its own criteria, to a
second
ORDINAL
understanding, in which the opposing thought is heard in the texts of the master of suspicion himself.
PART I:
ENERGETICS
AND
HERMENEUTICS
The Epistemological Problem in Freudianism
Our
first
ORDINAL
cycle of investigation concerns the structure of psychoanalytic
discourse. This prepares the way for an inspection of the phenomenon of
culture, which will be the subject matter of the
second
ORDINAL
cycle.
For the present inquiry I have used a title that directly indicates the central difficulty in the psychoanalytic epistemology.
Freud
ORG
’s writings present themselves as a mixed or even ambiguous discourse,
which at times states conflicts of force subject to an energetics, at
times relations of meaning subject to a hermeneutics. I hope to show
that there are good grounds for this apparent ambiguity, that this mixed
discourse is the raison
d’etre
ORG
of psychoanalysis.
I will limit myself in this introduction to
showing the necessity of both dimensions of psychoanalytic discourse.
The precise task of the
three
CARDINAL
chapters of Part I will be to overcome the gap between the
two
CARDINAL
orders of discourse and to reach the point where one sees that the
energetics implies a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discloses an
energetics. That point is where the positing or emergence of desire
manifests itself in and through a process of symbolization.
Within a topographic-economic explanation the status of interpretation, or
Deutung
PERSON
, presents itself at
first
ORDINAL
as an aporia. If we emphasize the deliberately antiphenomenological
bent of the topography, we appear to remove any basis for a reading of
psychoanalysis as hermeneutics; the substitution of the economic notions
of cathexis—i.e. placement and displacement of energy—for the notions
of intentional consciousness and intended object apparently
calls
for a naturalistic explanation and excludes an understanding of meaning
through meaning. In short, it would seem that the topographic-economic
point of view can uphold an energetics but not a hermeneutics. And yet
there is no doubt that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics: it is not by
accident but by intention that it aims at giving an interpretation of
culture in its entirety. But works of art, ideals, and illusions are
various modes of representation. And if we move from the periphery to
the center, from the theory of culture to the theory of dreams and the
neuroses, which forms the hard core of psychoanalysis, we are constantly
led back to interpretation, to the act of interpreting, to the work of
interpretation. It was in the work of dream interpretation, as we shall
fully elaborate, that the
Freudian
NORP
method was forged. All the “contents” with which the analyst works are
increasingly representational, from fantasies to works of art to
religious beliefs. But the problem of interpretation is exactly
coextensive with the problem of meaning or representation. Hence
psychoanalysis is interpretation from beginning to end.
This is
where the aporia arises: What is the status of representation or ideas
in relation to the notions of instinct, aim of instinct, and affect? How
can an interpretation of meaning through meaning be integrated with an
economics of cathexis, withdrawal of ca-thexis, anticathexis? At
first
ORDINAL
glance, there seems to be an antinomy between an explanation governed
by the principles of the metapsychology and an interpretation that
necessarily moves among meanings and not among forces, among
representations or ideas and not among instincts. As I see it, the whole
problem of the
Freudian
NORP
epistemology may be centralized in a single question: How can the
economic explanation be involved in an interpretation dealing with
meanings; and conversely, how can interpretation be an aspect of the
economic explanation? It is easier to fall back on a disjunction: either
an explanation in terms of energy, or an understanding in terms of
phenomenology. It must be recognized, however, that
Freudianism
ORG
exists only on the basis of its refusal of that disjunction.
The difficulty in the
Freudian
NORP
epistemology is not only its problem but also its solution. At the outset,
Freud
ORG
did not clearly see the entanglement of the points of view in the metapsychology. The sue-
cessive
presentations of the topography bear the mark—increasingly less
pronounced, it is true—of an initial state in which the topography is
cut off from the work of interpretation. What we call the “quantitative
hypothesis” weighs heavily upon the economic explanation. The result is
that all the later presentations of the topography suffer from a
residual dissociation; we will look for the key to the initial divorce
between explanation and interpretation in
the “Project” of 1895
EVENT
. This will be the object of our
first
ORDINAL
chapter. We will then show how the celebrated
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
takes up the line of thought of
the “Project
ORG
,” but also goes beyond it and more clearly paves the way for its
integration into the work of interpretation; this will be the concern of
our
second
ORDINAL
chapter. Finally, we will look to
the “Papers on Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
of
1914—17
CARDINAL
for the most mature expression of the theory and will concentrate at
some length on the relationship between instincts and representations or
ideas, which is the basis not only for all the difficulties but also
for all the attempts at resolution.
It may be that the
possibility of moving from force to language, but also the impossibility
of completely integrating force within language, lies in the positing
or emergence of desire.
Chapter 1
LAW
:
An Energetics Without Hermeneutics
ORG
The “
Project
WORK_OF_ART
” of
1895
DATE
represents what could be called a nonhermeneutic state of the system.
Indeed, the notion of the “psychical apparatus” that dominates this
essay appears to have no correlation with a work of deciphering—
although, as we shall see, the interpretation of neurotic symptoms is
not absent from this notion. The notion is based on a principle borrowed
from physics—the constancy principle—and tends to be a quantitative
treatment of energy. This recourse to the principle of constancy and the
quantitative hypothesis is the aspect of
Freudian
NORP
-ism that most resists the reading I propose, based on the correlation
between energetics and hermeneutics, between connections of forces <
4
CARDINAL
>
<
4
CARDINAL
> The essay known as
the “Project for a Scientific Psychology
ORG
” was
first
ORDINAL
published in
London
GPE
in
1950
DATE
at the end of a volume of letters from
Freud
ORG
to Wilhelm Fliess (including some drafts and notes), under the general title
Aus
ORG
der
Anfangen
ORG
der
Psychoanalyse
PERSON
(
London
GPE
,
Imago
GPE
,
1950
DATE
); Eng. trans.
Eric Mosbacher
PERSON
and
James Strachey
PERSON
, with an Introduction by
Ernst Kris
PERSON
,
The Origins of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
(
New York
GPE
,
Basic Books
ORG
,
1954
DATE
), pp.
355
CARDINAL
-445. The essay has in fact no definite title:
Freud
ORG
sometimes speaks of his
“Psychology for Neurologists”
WORK_OF_ART
(Letter
23 of Apr. 27, 1895
DATE
, Origins, p.
118
CARDINAL
) or simply of the system (Origins, p.
123
CARDINAL
) for reasons we shall
see later (n.
16
CARDINAL
). Concerning the title and aim of
the “Project
ORG
,” see
Kris
PERSON
, Introduction to Origins, pp.
25-27
CARDINAL
, as well as his
Editorial Note
WORK_OF_ART
to
the “Project,” Origins
ORG
, pp.
349-51
CARDINAL
; also
Ernest Jones
PERSON
,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
ORG
(
3
CARDINAL
vols.
New York
GPE
,
Basic Books
ORG
,
1953
DATE
),
1
CARDINAL
,
347
CARDINAL
. On the term “metapsychology,” see Letters 41 and
84
DATE
. Concerning the
first
ORDINAL
outlines of
the “Project
ORG
,” see the letter to Breuer of
June 29, 1892
DATE
(
GW
PERSON
,
17
CARDINAL
,
5
CARDINAL
; Collected Papers,
5
CARDINAL
,
25
CARDINAL
); this text will be printed in
SE, Vol
ORG
.
1
CARDINAL
(which has not yet appeared); see also the important “Preliminary Communication” which was written in
November 1892
DATE
, published in
Berlin
GPE
and
Vienna
GPE
at
the beginning of 1893
DATE
, and placed at the head of
the Studies on Hysteria of 1895 (GW, 1, 77 ff
ORG
.;
SE
PERSON
,
2
CARDINAL
,
1-17
DATE
). Among the notes and drafts prior to
the “Project
ORG
,” Drafts D and G are especially to be noted.
and relations of meanings. However,
the “Project” of 1895
ORG
is not meant to be a topography in the sense of
the “Papers on Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
; it is important at the outset not to identify the notion of psychical apparatus with the “topographic point of view”; the
first
ORDINAL
is simply patterned on a physical model, the
second
ORDINAL
is correlative to an interpretation of meaning through meaning. It must
be admitted that this quasi-physical conception of the psychical
apparatus was never completely eliminated from
Freudian
NORP
theory; however, I think the development of
Freudian
NORP
theory may be looked upon as the gradual reduction of the notion of
psychical apparatus —in the sense of “a machine which in a moment would
run of itself” <
5>—to
CARDINAL
a topography in which space is no longer a place within the world but a
scene of action where roles and masks enter into debate; <
6
CARDINAL
> this space will become a place of ciphering and deciphering.
<
5
CARDINAL
>
Letter 32
PERSON
, Origins, p.
129
CARDINAL
.
<
6
CARDINAL
> We read in
Draft L
ORG
(enclosed in
Letter
GPE
61
CARDINAL
of
May 2, 1897
DATE
): “
Multiplicity of Psychical Personalities
ORG
. The fact of identification may perhaps allow of this phrase being taken literally”
(Origins
WORK_OF_ART
, p.
199
CARDINAL
).
Of course, because of the constancy principle, the explanation
in terms of energy will always remain somewhat external to the
interpretation of meaning through meaning; the topography will always
retain an ambiguous character: it may be regarded both as the
development of the primitive theory of the psychical apparatus and as a
sustained movement to free itself from that theory. Accordingly, we will
pay close attention to what happens to the quantitative hypothesis
through the successive stages that lead from
the “Project”
ORG
to the topography (or topographies). In this connection, it should be mentioned that the
four or five
CARDINAL
ways in which the system is expressed have by no means the same epistemological significance. In particular,
Chapter 7
LAW
of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
holds the most equivocal position, situated as it is between
the “Project”
LAW
and the
two
CARDINAL
topographies. It is truly a development of
the “Project
ORG
,” of the principle of constancy, and of the quantitative hypothesis,
and yet it is connected with interpretation in a way that suggests the
later topography. This situation should not perplex us. As I hope to
show later, it is not in the topography that the quantitative hypothesis
is radically brought into question, but in the
confrontation—
ORG
nontopographical or hypertopographical—of all the forces of
desire, of all the forces of the libido, with the death instinct. It is
the death instinct that upsets everything: what is “beyond the pleasure
principle” cannot help but have repercussions upon the constancy
hypothesis with which the pleasure principle was initially coupled (cf. “
Analytic
ORG
,” Part III,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
).
THE CONSTANCY PRINCIPLE AND
THE QUANTITATIVE APPARATUS
PRODUCT
The opening statement of
the “Project”
ORG
merits citation:
The intention of this project is to furnish us
with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is
to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of
specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of
contradictions. The project involves
two
CARDINAL
principal ideas:
1
CARDINAL
. That what distinguishes activity from rest is to be regarded as a quantity (Q) subject to the general laws of motion.
2
CARDINAL
. That it is to be assumed that the material particles in question are the neurons. <
7
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
7> Origins
TIME
, p.
355
CARDINAL
. In a letter dated
May 25, 1895
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
says: “I am plagued with
two
CARDINAL
ambitions: to see how the theory of mental functioning takes shape if
quantitative considerations, a sort of economics of nerve-force, are
introduced into it; and
secondly
ORDINAL
, to extract from psychopathology what may be of benefit to normal psychology” (Origins, pp.
119-20
CARDINAL
). And
five months later (Oct. 20, 1895
DATE
): “The
three
CARDINAL
systems of neurons, the ‘free’ and ‘
bound’
GPE
states of quantity, the primary and
secondary
ORDINAL
processes, the main trend and the compromise trend of the nervous system, the
two
CARDINAL
biological rules of attention and defense, the indications of quality,
reality, and thought, the state of the psycho-sexual group, the sexual
determination of repression, and finally the factors determining
consciousness as a perceptual function—the whole thing held together,
and still does. I can naturally hardly contain myself with delight”
(Origins, p.
129
CARDINAL
).
We are indebted to
Bernfeld
PERSON
, <8><9>
Jones
PERSON
,® and
Kris
PERSON
, <
10
CARDINAL
> for a careful reconstruction of the scientific environment in which
such a project could arise. This is also the environment psychoanalysis
will have to
<
8> S. Bernfeld
TIME
, “Freud’s Earliest Theories and
the School of Helmholtz
ORG
,” Psychoanal. Quart.,
13
CARDINAL
(
1944
DATE
),
341
CARDINAL
.
<
9
CARDINAL
>
Life and Work
WORK_OF_ART
,
1
CARDINAL
,
33
CARDINAL
-35,
39—43
CARDINAL
.
fight against. But in any event
Freud
ORG
will never disavow its fundamental convictions: like all his
Vienna
GPE
and
Berlin
GPE
teachers,
Freud
ORG
sees and will continue to see in science the sole discipline of
knowledge, the single rule of all intellectual honesty, a world view
that excludes all other views, especially that of the old religion. In
Vienna
GPE
, as in
Berlin
GPE
,
Naturphilosophie
GPE
and its scientific counterpart, vitalism, gave way in biology to a
physico-physiological theory based on the ideas of force, attraction,
and repulsion, all
three
CARDINAL
being governed by the principle of the conservation of energy (discovered by
Robert Mayer
PERSON
in
1842
DATE
and made prominent by
Helmholtz
PERSON
). According to that principle the sum of forces (motor and potential) remains constant in an isolated system.
Today
DATE
we have a better knowledge of the influence of the
Helmholtz
PERSON
school in
Vienna
GPE
, <
11
QUANTITY
> as well as of
Freud
ORG
’s first scientific works in neurology and embryology; as a result the “Project” of
1895
DATE
no longer seems so singular to us. It is of interest not so much
because of its presuppositions, which are not peculiar to it, but
because of its aim of holding determinedly to the hypothesis of
constancy in new areas where it had not been tested: the theory of
desire and pleasure, education to reality through “unpleasure,” the
incorporation within the system of observant and judging thought. In so
doing
Freud
ORG
not only extended
Helmholtz
PERSON
but also linked up with the tradition of
Herbart
ORG
, <
12
CARDINAL
> who, beginning in
1824
DATE
, had protested against free will, linked determinism with unconscious
motivation, and applied the terminology of physics to a dynamics of
ideas. The use of the word “idea” in the sense of perception and
representation; the theme that ideas have primacy over affects, which
plays an eminent role in the metapsychological papers; and perhaps even
the word— if not the notion of—
Verdrangung
PERSON
(repression) may also be traced to
Herbart
ORG
.
Freud
ORG
’s relationship to
Herbart
ORG
on the precise point of
<
11
CARDINAL
>
Briicke
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
’s
first
ORDINAL
master, is the
Viennese
NORP
link between
Helmholtz
PERSON
and
Freud
PERSON
; cf.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
371
CARDINAL
-79.
<
12
CARDINAL
> There are
two
CARDINAL
lines of influence,
one
CARDINAL
from
Helmholtz
PERSON
to
Freud
ORG
and one from
Herbart
ORG
and
Fechner
ORG
to
Freud
ORG
; both lines pass through
Briicke
PERSON
, and also through
Griesinger
PERSON
and
Meynert
PERSON
. On
Freud
ORG
’s use of the word “idea” in the
Herbartian
NORP
sense, cf.
A. C. MacIntyre
PERSON
,
The Unconscious (London
ORG
,
Routledge
GPE
,
1958
DATE
), p.
11
CARDINAL
. On the
Herbartian
NORP
origin of the word “repression,” see the interesting remarks made by
Jones
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
280
CARDINAL
-81.
the principle of constancy is beyond all doubt: the
“striving for equilibrium” is the guiding principle of that
“mathematical psychology” and its calculus of forces and quantities.
Finally,
Freud
ORG
places himself in the company of
Herbart
ORG
and
Fechner
ORG
<
13
CARDINAL
> when he gives up any anatomical basis for his psychical system, thus restoring psychology to the place
Herbart
ORG
wished to give it.
<
13
CARDINAL
> “The only sensible thing on the subject was said by old
Fechner
ORG
in his sublime simplicity: that the psychical territory on which the dream process is played out is a different one” (Letter
83
DATE
, Origins, pp.
244
CARDINAL
-45).
Thus the
1895
CARDINAL
“Project” belongs to a whole period of scientific thought. What is most interesting is the manner in which
Freud
ORG
, by extending this thought, transforms it to the breaking point. In this regard the “Project” stands as the greatest effort
Freud
ORG
ever made to force a mass of psychical facts within the framework of a
quantitative theory, and as the demonstration by way of the absurd that
the content exceeds the frame: not even in
Chapter 7
LAW
of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
will
Freud
ORG
try to make so many things fit together within such a narrow system. Nothing is more dated than the explanatory plan of
the “Project,”
ORG
and nothing more inexhaustible than its program of description. As
one
CARDINAL
enters more deeply into
the “Project,” one
ORG
has the impression that the quantitative framework and the neuronic
support recede into the background, until they are no more than a given
and convenient language of reference which supplies the necessary
constraint for the expression of great discoveries. The same adventure
will be repeated in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, in which biology plays the double role of language of reference, and pretext for the discovery of the death instinct.
Let us try to untangle these
two
CARDINAL
developments: the generalization of the constancy principle, and the fact that it is transcended by its own applications.
It should be noted that
Freud
ORG
does not say much about the origin and nature of what he calls
“quantity.” As for its origin, it comes from external or internal
excitations and covers pretty much the idea of perceptual and
instinctual stimuli; the notion Q serves to unify under a single concept
anything that produces energy. As for its nature,
Freud
ORG
simply characterizes it as a summation of excitation homologous to physical energy: it is a current which flows,
which “stores,” “fills” or “empties,” and “charges” neurons; the all-important notion of “cathexis” was
first
ORDINAL
elaborated within this neuronic framework as a synonym of storing up and filling (Origins, pp.
358
CARDINAL
-62). Thus the “
Project
WORK_OF_ART
” talks about cathected or empty neurons; it will also speak of a rise
or fall in level of charge, of discharge and resistance to discharge, of
contact barriers, screens, stored quantity, freely mobile or “bound”
quantity.
Freud
ORG
adopts this last notion from
Breuer
GPE
; later we will see why. We will meet all of these notions in other
contexts, but in an increasingly metaphorical sense. It is to be noted,
however, that in
the “Project” Freud
ORG
does not go further along the path of determining
Q.
PERSON
No measure is stated: the quantities are spoken of as being “of a comparatively low order” (p.
366
CARDINAL
), as being “large” or “excessively large” (p.
368
CARDINAL
), but there is no numerical law concerning them. A curious quantity
indeed! We shall come back to this point at the end of the chapter.
But if the quantity obeys no numerical law, it is nonetheless governed by a principle, the principle of constancy, which
Freud
ORG
develops from the principle of inertia. The principle of inertia means that the system tends to reduce its own tensions to
zero
CARDINAL
, i.e. to discharge its quantities, to “get rid of” them (pp.
356
CARDINAL
-57); the principle of constancy means that the system tends to maintain
the level of tension as low as possible. The divergence between
constancy and inertia is in itself very interesting,
<14><15> for it already points to the intervention of what
will later be described as the “secondary process.” The impossibility
for the system to eliminate all tensions results from the lack of an
equivalent of flight regarding dangers from within: the psychical
apparatus is forced to store up and cathect a stock of contrivances made
up of a permanent group of bound quantities whose object is to reduce
the tensions although they cannot completely eliminate them.
Freud
ORG
writes toward the beginning of the “
Project”:
LAW
<
14
CARDINAL
>
MacIntyre
PERSON
(pp.
16-22
CARDINAL
) compares
Freud
ORG
’s notion of quantity to
Engels’
ORG
matter in motion and contrasts
Freud with Lorenz
ORG
, for whom the energy model is only a model.
<
15
CARDINAL
>
Kris
PERSON
(Origins, p.
358
CARDINAL
, n.
1
CARDINAL
) sees here the sketch of the future distinction between the
Nirvana
ORG
principle and the pleasure principle. One might also ask whether the
trend toward zero does not point to the death instinct. In any case, it
will be impossible to say that
Eros
NORP
wishes Q =
0
CARDINAL
.
Cf
PERSON
. below, “
Analytic
WORK_OF_ART
," Part III,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
.
The neuronic system is consequently obliged to abandon its
original trend towards inertia (that is, towards a reduction of its
level of tension to
zero
CARDINAL
). It must learn to tolerate a store of quantity (
Qrj
GPE
) sufficient to meet the demands for specific action. In so far as it
does so, however, the same trend still persists in the modified form of a
tendency to keep the quantity down, at least, so far as possible and
avoid any increase in it (that is, to keep its level of tension
constant). All the performances of the neuronic system are to be
comprised under the heading either of the primary function or of the
secondary
ORDINAL
function imposed by the
exigencies
CARDINAL
of life. <
16
CARDINAL
> (p.
358
CARDINAL
).
<
16
CARDINAL
> The distinction between the primary and the secondary processes
will be established at length further on; for the present let us say
simply that it is a matter of distinguishing between reaction in a
quasi-hallucinatory manner and a correct exploitation of the indications
of reality on the part of the ego (Origins, pp.
388-89
CARDINAL
).
Thus from its
first
ORDINAL
formulation, which distinguishes it from the principle of inertia, the
principle of constancy brings into play the secondary process, whose
anatomical basis is strictly unknown: indeed, further on
Freud
ORG
will postulate, for reasons of symmetry, a group of neurons which
retain a bound stored energy and which he calls the “ego” (pp.
384-86
CARDINAL
).
Freud
ORG
will always try to regard the principle of constancy as equivalent to
the principle of inertia for an apparatus that is forced to act and
defend itself against internal dangers for which there is no screen
comparable to the sensory apparatus, the latter acting both as barrier
and receptor. <
17
CARDINAL
>
<
17
CARDINAL
> This will be
one
CARDINAL
of the basic themes of The Ego and the Id. Whereas there exists a
“perceptual screen,” the ego is exposed without any protection to the
excitations from its instincts. The notion that perception is a
selective system regarding excitations from the external world, whereas
desires leave us unprotected, is a profound
one
CARDINAL
. One might compare it to the
Nietzschean
NORP
concept of danger.
The metaphorical character of the constancy principle is heightened when
one
CARDINAL
considers that it extends to a variety of apparatuses
at least one
CARDINAL
of which concerns the contrary of quantity, namely quality. <
18
CARDINAL
> “Consciousness gives us what we call ‘qualities’ ” (p.
369
CARDINAL
) (we will see the great importance these qualities have for
reality-testing); “thus we must summon up enough courage to assume that
there is a
third
ORDINAL
system of neurons—‘perceptual
neurons’
NORP
they might be called,” <
19><20
CARDINAL
> which are “contrivances for changing external quantity into quality” (p.
370
CARDINAL
).
Freud
ORG
tried to attach them to the quantitative system by assigning them a
temporal property, periodicity: “the period of neuronic motion is
transmitted without inhibition in every direction, as though it were a
process of induction” (p.
371).17
CARDINAL
This enables
Freud
PRODUCT
to differentiate himself from the school of parallelism and the
epiphenomenalists: since it is bound to a specific group of neurons,
consciousness is not an ineffectual double of the nervous process in
general.
<
18
CARDINAL
> It may be asked whether the difference between
the -neurons
ORG
, which allow a current to “pass through” them and then return to their
former state, and the ^-neurons, which are “permanently altered” by the
current (Origins, pp.
359-60
CARDINAL
), is not the transcription of a fundamentally qualitative distinction,
viz. the opposition between receiving and retaining, perceiving and
remembering.
<
19
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
designates these neurons by the letter
W
PERSON
(
Wahrnehmung
GPE
), which he then jokingly changes to a> so as to call the
three
CARDINAL
kinds of postulated neurons ,'I',a>. Thus it is that in his letters he speaks of his system (Origins, pp.
123
CARDINAL
-24). The
4>-neurons
CARDINAL
are essentially “permeable” (i.e. they offer no resistance and retain
nothing) and serve the function of perception; the ^-neurons are
essentially “impermeable” (i.e. they retain quantity) and thus are the
vehicles of memory and presumably also of psychical processes in general
(Origins, p.
360
CARDINAL
).
<
20
CARDINAL
> The introduction of time is of the greatest importance; we will
often come back to it. The unconscious is timeless. It should be noted
that time is intimately connected with quality, which plays a role in
reality-testing. Time, consciousness, and reality are thus correlative
notions.
What is yet more serious, however, is the fact that the
whole system rests on the simply postulated equivalence between
unpleasure and the rise in the level of tension on the one hand, and
between pleasure and the lowering of the level on the other:
Since we have certain knowledge of a trend in psychical life
towards avoiding unpleasure, we are tempted to identify that
trend with the trend towards inertia. In that case unpleasure
would
coincide with a rise in the level of quantity (Qfi) or with a
quantitative increase of pressure; it would be the perceptual sensation
when there is an increase of quantity (<
2ij
ORDINAL
) in '?• Pleasure would be the sensation of discharge, (p.
373
CARDINAL
)
This is a mere postulate, since unpleasure and pleasure are sensed intensities which
Freud
ORG
localizes along with sensory qualities in a
third
ORDINAL
type of neurons, the to-neurons, and since he characterizes these intensities as the cathexis of
21
CARDINAL
> In fact, this is a new example of the transformation of quantity into quality, which
Freud
ORG
tries to liken to the previous transformation by again appealing to the phenomenon of periodicity (pp.
373-74
CARDINAL
) already called upon to account for sensory qualities. <
22
CARDINAL
>
Desires
PERSON
or wishes enter this mechanistic theory (pp.
383
CARDINAL
-84) through the intermediary of the traces left by the experiences of
pleasure and unpleasure: it is to be assumed that the cathexis of a
pleasant memory in a state of desire is far greater than the cathexis of
a mere perception. This assumption allows for a
first
ORDINAL
definition of repression (equated here with primary defense) as the removal of cathexis from a hostile memory image (p.
383
CARDINAL
). <
23
CARDINAL
>
<
21
CARDINAL
> o> and function “to some extent like inter-communicating pipes
” (Origins, p. 373).
WORK_OF_ART
MacIntyre
PERSON
(p.
18
CARDINAL
) is right: the model is taken from hydraulics.
<
22
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
will always endeavor to find a law to explain the alternation of
sensory qualities with the affective qualities of pleasure-unpleasure:
the various sensory qualities lie in a zone of indifference and seem to
require an optimum point of reception, linked with the phenomenon of
periodicity (Origins, pp.
373
CARDINAL
-74); beyond or short of that point it is the charge (cathexis) or discharge as such that is perceived.
Freud
ORG
rightly saw that this perception obeys the laws of summation and of threshold (ibid., pp.
377
CARDINAL
-78).
<
23
CARDINAL
> On the relation between the notions of defense and repression, see the important work of
Peter Madison
PERSON
,
Freud's Concept of Repression and Defense
ORG
, Its
Theoretical
FAC
and Observational Language (
Minneapolis
GPE
,
University of Minnesota Press
ORG
,
1961
DATE
); cf. below, p.
138
CARDINAL
, n.
58
CARDINAL
, and p.
355
CARDINAL
, n.
18
CARDINAL
.
At this point, however, the system starts to break down: the
pleasure-unpleasure combination sets into play much more than the
isolated functioning of the psychical apparatus; it sets into play the
external world (food, the sexual partner), and with the external world
other persons appear. It is remarkable that
Freud
ORG
, in designating the overall process that encompasses being aided by others, chose to speak of the experience of satisfaction:
At
early stages the human organism is incapable of achieving this specific
action. It is brought about by extraneous help, when the attention of
an experienced person has been drawn to the child’s condition by a
discharge taking place along the path of internal change [e.g. by the
child’s screaming]. This path of discharge thus acquires an extremely
important secondary function
—viz
GPE
., of bringing about an understanding with other people; and the
original helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source of all
moral motives, (p.
379
CARDINAL
)
The experience of satisfaction is indeed a sort of
“test-experience”: it is related to reality-testing and marks the
transition from the primary to the secondary process.
Freud
PERSON
tried to maintain this detour through reality within the framework of
the principle of constancy by finking the regulation by reality to the
sole principle of unpleasure: “Unpleasure remains the sole means of
education” (p.
428
CARDINAL
). But the avoidance of unpleasure in turn implies several processes
that are scarcely quantifiable; these come down basically to the work of
discriminating between hallucinatory desires and perceptual qualities, a
work coupled with the ego organization’s function of inhibiting.
When
first
ORDINAL
examined, these themes fit in quite well with the central hypothesis:
in the primary process, where the apparatus functions most in accord
with the principle of inertia, discharge takes the path of a recathexis
of the memory images of the “wished-for” object and of movements to
obtain it; it is assumed that this reactivation produces the analogue of
a perception, i.e. a hallucination: “I have no doubt that the wishful
activation will in the
first
ORDINAL
instance produce something similar to a perception—namely, a hallucination” (p.
381
CARDINAL
). <
24
CARDINAL
> This mistake produces real unpleasure and an excessive reaction on
the part of the primary defense; together these reactions can be
biologically damaging.
Chapter 7 of
LAW
the
Traum
NORP
-deutung will again postulate no discrimination between images and
perceptions in the primary process, and to account for this will devise a
topographical regression within the functioning of the psychical
apparatus; <
25
CARDINAL
> the assumption is made that the excessive charge of the desire
produces an image similar to the indication of a perceptual quality. We
shall have much to say at the proper time about this hypothesis. <
26
CARDINAL
> For the present, how does discrimination come about in the secondary process?
<
24>
TIME
Recognizable here is the condition described by
Meynert
PERSON
as amentia (acute hallucinatory psychosis), which
Jones
PERSON
(
1
CARDINAL
,
353
CARDINAL
) sees as
one
CARDINAL
of the starting points for the theory of the primary process in
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
.
<
25
CARDINAL
> This mechanism is foreshadowed in
the “Project,” Origins
ORG
, pp.
43839
DATE
: “We must necessarily suppose that in states of hallucination the quantity (Q) flows back to $ and at the same time to
W
PERSON
(<«). Thus a bound neuron does not permit such a flow-back to occur” (p.
438
CARDINAL
).
<
26
CARDINAL
> See below the discussion of
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
and the interpretation of dreams as being quasi-hallucinatory, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part I,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
2
CARDINAL
,
second
ORDINAL
section.
For the
first
ORDINAL
time
Freud
ORG
establishes a connection between discriminating between the real and
the imaginary and the function of inhibition, attributing the latter to
what has already been called the “ego organization” (pp.
384-86
CARDINAL
). It is a point that will never change: the constant cathexis of the
ego, the function of inhibiting, and reality-testing will always go
together. <
27
CARDINAL
> “Where, then, an ego exists, it is bound to inhibit primary psychical processes” (p.
385
CARDINAL
). To make this new idea accord with the system,
Freud
ORG
postulates an organization of neurons with a constant charge—“a network
of cathected neurons, well facilitated in relation to one another” (p.
385
CARDINAL
). This text also contains the
first
ORDINAL
sketch of a genetic explanation of the ego. As in The Ego and the Id
later on, this reserve of energy arises by means of cumulative
borrowings from endogenous quantity; this bound energy forms a system of
tensions at a constant level.
<
27
CARDINAL
>
Kris
PERSON
(Origins, p.
384
CARDINAL
, n.
3
CARDINAL
) sees in this analysis the
first
ORDINAL
anticipation of the theory of the ego in The Ego and the Id (
1923
DATE
).
But what is inhibition?
Freud
ORG
puts it as follows: the ego learns not to cathect motor images or the
ideas of desired objects. This “restriction” or “limitation,” which
foreshadows the famous
Ver-neinung
PRODUCT
, the movement by way of the No, is presented here as a mechanical
effect of the threat of unpleasure; it is not clear, however, how the
“moral motives” and the “mutual facilitation” alluded to above fit in
with this hedonistic principle.
Freud
ORG
admits, moreover, that he is unable to give a mechanical explanation
how the threat of unpleasure governs the noncathexis of quantities
accumulated in the ego (p.
428
CARDINAL
); on this occasion he states: “From this point onwards I shall venture
to omit any mechanical representation of biological rules of this kind;
and I shall be content if I can henceforward keep faithfully to a
clearly demonstrable course of development” (p.
428
CARDINAL
).
It is still more difficult to give a mechanical explanation of the connection between inhibition and discrimination;
Freud
ORG
assumes that discrimination is based on “indications of reality”
arising from the system a>: “It is this report of a discharge coming
from W (co) that constitutes an indication of quality or reality to (p.
387
CARDINAL
). But how does inhibition enable these indications to operate?
Freud
ORG
focuses upon the difficulty in these terms: “it is the inhibition
brought about by the ego that makes possible a criterion for
distinguishing between a perception and a memory” (p.
388
CARDINAL
). But the explanation he gives is rather a description of the problem to be resolved:
Wishful
cathexis carried to the point of hallucination and a complete
generation of unpleasure, involving a complete expenditure of defense,
may be described as “psychical primary processes.” On the other hand,
those processes which are only made possible by a good cathexis of the
ego and which represent a moderation of the primary processes may be
described as “psychical secondary processes.” It will be seen that the
sine qua non of the latter is a correct exploitation of the indications
of reality and that this is only possible when there is inhibition on
the part of the ego.—We have thus put forward a hypothesis to the effect
that, during the process of wishing, inhibition on the part of the ego
leads to a moderation of the cathexis of the object wished-for, which
makes it possible for that object to be recognized as not being a real
one. (pp.
388
CARDINAL
-89)
Along with discrimination, certain functions are assigned to
the system that are less and less ascribable to measurable energies. In
the
third
ORDINAL
part, the “
Project
WORK_OF_ART
” introduces some descriptive themes that will not be developed until much later: “judgment”—a term borrowed from
W. Jerusalem
GPE
—is conceived as the recognition of the identity between a wishful
cathexis and a perceptual indication of reality; this real recognition
of a wished-for object is the
first
ORDINAL
stage in achieving an estimation of reality, a belief.
Freud
ORG
is confident that he can give a quantitative interpretation of it, but it is clear that “the cathexis of ^-neurons” (p.
396
CARDINAL
) is simply a translation of psychology into a conventional technical language.
The same may be said of “attention,” conceived as the interest aroused in 'P by the indications of reality. The explanation
Freud
ORG
proposes is already an economic one: the interest consists in the fact that the ego has learned to hypercathect perception (p.
419
CARDINAL
). But does this remain a mechanical and quantitative explanation?
Still
more remarkable is the role attributed to the verbal stage of
“observant thought.” Verbal images—the famous “things heard” which
combine with “things experienced” in the childhood seduction scene
—contribute not only to the construction of fantasies; their positive
function is contemporaneous with attention and understanding (p.
423
CARDINAL
). Verbal images contribute to the
secondary
ORDINAL
function by becoming indications of thought-reality rather than of
perceived reality: “Thus we have found that the characteristic thing
about the process of cognitive thought is that the attention is from the
start directed to the indications of the discharge of thought— that is,
to indications of speech” (p.
424
CARDINAL
).
Freud
ORG
will remain faithful to this notion of
two degrees
QUANTITY
of reality, the
first
ORDINAL
on the biological and perceptual level, the
second
ORDINAL
on the intellectual and scientific level: “Thought which is accompanied
by the cathexis of indications of thought-reality or of indications of
speech is the highest and most secure form of cognitive thought-process”
(p.
431
CARDINAL
). The sci-
25
CARDINAL
.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
371
CARDINAL
, and Origins, p.
120
CARDINAL
.
26
CARDINAL
. It would be impossible to overemphasize this theme: Letter
46
CARDINAL
connects in the same way the process of becoming conscious and “verbal consciousness” (Origins, p.
165
CARDINAL
). We shall return to this point when dealing with The Ego and the Id.
The same letter anticipates another basic point: “An increase in the
uninhibited processes to the point of their alone being in possession of
the path to verbal consciousness produces psychoses
” (Origins, p. 166).
WORK_OF_ART
27
CARDINAL
. Cf. the important
Draft M
ORG
attached to
Letter
GPE
63
CARDINAL
of
May 25, 1897
DATE
(Origins, p.
204
CARDINAL
).
entist’s disinterestedness, his ability to concentrate steadily on an idea, is thus translated into energy terms. To do this,
Freud
ORG
returns to
Breuer
ORG
’s notion of bound energy, defining it as a “condition in the neurons,
which, though there is a high cathexis, permits only a small current to
flow” (p.
425
CARDINAL
). “Thus the process of thought would be characterized mechanically by
this bound condition, which combines a high cathexis with a small flow
of current" (p.
426
CARDINAL
). But it must be admitted that from now on there is no longer any
anatomical basis; moreover, the shortcomings of thought, unlike the
confusion between hallucinations and perceptions, do not give rise to
biological sanctions of unpleasure: “In theoretical thought no part is
played by unpleasure” (p.
443
CARDINAL
). This is the clearest instance where description is seen to go beyond the mechanical explanation.
TOWARD
THE TOPOGRAPHY
WORK_OF_ART
If now we step back a bit and place
the “Project”
LAW
on the trajectory of the successive topographies,
two
CARDINAL
sets of remarks present themselves:
1
CARDINAL
. That which cuts explanation off from any work of deciphering, from any
reading of symptoms and signs, is the pretension of making a
quantitative psychology of desire, comparable to
Fech
ORG
-ner’s quantitative psychology of sensations, correspond to a mechanical system of neurons. In this regard
the “Project”
LAW
is
Freud
ORG
’s final attempt to give an anatomical translation of his discoveries;
the “Project”
ORG
is the final parting of the ways with anatomy in the form of an
imaginary anatomy. The topography, to be sure, will always be couched in
the language of a quasi anatomy; consciousness, conceived as a sensory
organ, a “surface” organ, will remain a quasi cortex; but the attempt to
localize the functions and roles attributed to the “agencies” of the
later topography will never be made again. We must go even further: this
final attempt is also the
first
ORDINAL
step in the emancipation of “psychology”: the tenor of the text is psychological, not neurological. At the very time
Freud
ORG
was writing the “Project” the anatomical basis of his system was being undermined.
Divided between the clinic and the laboratory, between
Charcot
GPE
and
Briicke
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
is already closer to the more clinical-minded
French
NORP
than to the more anatomical-minded
Germans
NORP
. At a very early period—1891!—his criticism of theories of
localization, which he formulated in his critical study on aphasia, had
made him wary of any premature organic explanation of psychical
disturbances. But above all, the great discovery of
those years
DATE
, the one that was to estrange him from the scientific milieu of the
university and the medical profession—the discovery of the sexual
etiology of the neuroses—remains purely clinical and is not paralleled
by any properly organic hypothesis; in particular the clinical entity of
hysterical paralysis is established in opposition to the anatomists:
everything takes place,
Freud
ORG
remarked, as if there were no such thing as anatomy of the brain.
This episode was as decisive as the study of aphasia in detaching
Freud
ORG
from any premature organic explanation. During the same period, his incursion into the cathartic method of
Breuer
GPE
, coupled with his disappointment with electrotherapy, confirmed the
properly psychical genesis of symptoms: “hysterical patients,” wrote
Breuer
PERSON
and
Freud
PERSON
in
the “Preliminary Communication
ORG
,” “suffer principally from reminiscences”; what disappeared by a
28
CARDINAL
. Jones,
1
CARDINAL
,
185
CARDINAL
ff.; Origins, pp.
55
CARDINAL
,
58
CARDINAL
. What place should be assigned to
Freud
ORG
’s
three
CARDINAL
unsuccessful attempts, made in
1878
DATE
,
1884
DATE
, and
1885
DATE
, to handle the experimental method? (
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
54-55
DATE
). The cocaine episode (
1884-87
DATE
) was perhaps even more decisive (
Jones
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
78-97
DATE
);
Freud
ORG
’s self-analysis would later reveal that episode’s deep and lasting
effect, which he was inclined to interpret in terms of unconscious
guilt: cf. the dream of ‘
Irma
GPE
’s injection’ (
July 24, 1895
DATE
), which is related in the
Traumdeutung
GPE
(Jones,
1
CARDINAL
,
354
CARDINAL
). On all these points, cf.
Didier Anzieu
ORG
, L’Auto-analyse (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1959
DATE
),
Ch
PRODUCT
.
1
CARDINAL
: “L’Auto-analyse
de Freud
PERSON
et la decouverte de la psychanalyse.”
29
CARDINAL
.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
212
CARDINAL
-16;
An Autobiographical Study (1925
GPE
),
SE
PERSON
,
20
CARDINAL
,
18
CARDINAL
. In On
Aphasia
GPE
, his
first
ORDINAL
book, published in
1891
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
boldly attacked the localization schemes drawn up by
Wernicke and Lichtheim
ORG
and proposed instead a functional explanation, citing to this effect
Hughlings Jackson
PERSON
’s doctrine of “disinvolution.”
30
CARDINAL
. Sexuality and speech both share, however, in organic and psychical factors. Jones,
1
CARDINAL
,
272
CARDINAL
.
31
CARDINAL
.
Jones
ORG
,
1
DATE
,
233
CARDINAL
;
An Autobiographical Study
GPE
,
SE
PERSON
,
20
DATE
,
13—14
CARDINAL
.
32
CARDINAL
. An Autobiographical Study, SE,
20
CARDINAL
,
19
CARDINAL
;
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
204
CARDINAL
.
33
CARDINAL
. “On the History of
the Psychoanalytic Movement”
ORG
(
1914
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
46
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
9
CARDINAL
.
34
CARDINAL
. “Preliminary Communication,” Studies on
Hysteria
GPE
,
GW
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
86
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
2
DATE
,
7
DATE
.
psychical procedure must have come into existence by a
psychical means. It is exciting to follow, in the “Letters to Fliess” as
well as in the accompanying notes and drafts, the development of the
idea that the physical energy of sexuality demands a properly psychical
stage; the essential reason for constructing the concept of the libido
at its psychological and nonanatomical level was to account for the
disturbances that affect this psychical elaboration of sexuality; the
libido is the
first
ORDINAL
concept that can be said to be both energic and nonanatomical. <
28><29
CARDINAL
>
The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
ORG
will definitively determine this concept of “the psychical energy of the sexual instincts.”
<
28
CARDINAL
>
Concerning
PERSON
the transition from “physical sexual tension” to “psychical libido,”
see Origins
WORK_OF_ART
, p.
91
CARDINAL
, Draft E. It is mainly the phenomenon of anxiety that forces
Freud
ORG
to consider that “sexual tension” is “worked over psychically” (p.
93
CARDINAL
), or more precisely, “transformed into affects.” In a note to
Draft G
ORG
of
January 7, 1895
DATE
,
Kris
GPE
cites an important excerpt from the
first
ORDINAL
of
Freud
ORG
’s
two
CARDINAL
papers on anxiety neurosis (
1895
DATE
). The role “representations” or “ideas” play, which we shall stress in
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
of this part of the “
Analytic
NORP
,” is expressly set up in that paper: once the excitation has become a
psychical stimulus, “the group of sexual ideas present in the mind
becomes charged with energy and a psychical state of libidinal tension
comes into existence, bringing with it an impulse to relieve this
tension” (Origins, p.
102
CARDINAL
, n.
5
CARDINAL
). Along the same lines
Draft G
ORG
speaks of the “psychical sexual group” (ibid., p.
103
CARDINAL
). The entire theory of anxiety neurosis is based on the notion that
something blocks the psychical elaboration of the excitation.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
241
CARDINAL
-50,
258
CARDINAL
-59.
<
29
CARDINAL
> This notion is taken up again in Part II of
the “Project” (pp
ORG
. 405-
16
CARDINAL
), which is inserted between
the “General Scheme”
LAW
and
the “Account of Normal ^-Processes
EVENT
” (the secondary process, etc.): “compulsion, which is operated by means
of excessively intense ideas,” and which is found in hysteria, is at
the same time the demonstration of quantity. As
Freud
ORG
notes, “The term ‘excessively intense’ points to quantitative characteristics” (p.
407
CARDINAL
). It is from the mechanisms of neurosis (conversion of affects in
hysteria, displacement of affects in obsession, transformation of
affects in the anxiety neuroses) that
Freud
ORG
,
a year
DATE
before
the “Project
ORG
,” “reads off” quantity: “
‘Sexual affect,’
WORK_OF_ART
” he writes, “is, of course, taken in its widest sense, as an excitation with a definite quantity” (Letter 18, Origins, p.
85
CARDINAL
). Draft D clearly shows the correlation between the sexual etiology of the neuroses and the theory of constancy (Origins, p.
87
CARDINAL
).
2
CARDINAL
. Perhaps we can go even further:
the “Project”
ORG
is not merely a mechanical system cut off from interpretation by its
anatomical hypothesis; it is already a topography, linked by underground
connections to the work of deciphering symptoms. Hermeneutics is
already present in this text.
First
ORDINAL
, the notion of quantity: it is surprising that it is never measured,
but from the outset it has a concrete, tangible characteristic that it
owes to clinical observation: “This line of approach,”
Freud
ORG
says at the beginning of the “Project,” “is derived directly from
pathological clinical observations, especially from those concerned with
‘excessively intense ideas.’ (These occur in hysteria and obsessional
neurosis, where, as we shall see, the quantitative characteristic
emerges more plainly than in the normal)” (p.
356
CARDINAL
) . <
30
CARDINAL
>
<
30
CARDINAL
> This notion is taken up again in Part II of
the “Project” (pp
ORG
. 405-
16
CARDINAL
), which is inserted between
the “General Scheme”
LAW
and
the “Account of Normal ^-Processes
EVENT
” (the secondary process, etc.): “compulsion, which is operated by means
of excessively intense ideas,” and which is found in hysteria, is at
the same time the demonstration of quantity. As
Freud
ORG
notes, “The term ‘excessively intense’ points to quantitative characteristics” (p.
407
CARDINAL
). It is from the mechanisms of neurosis (conversion of affects in
hysteria, displacement of affects in obsession, transformation of
affects in the anxiety neuroses) that
Freud
ORG
,
a year
DATE
before
the “Project
ORG
,” “reads off” quantity: “
‘Sexual affect,’
WORK_OF_ART
” he writes, “is, of course, taken in its widest sense, as an excitation with a definite quantity” (Letter 18, Origins, p.
85
CARDINAL
). Draft D clearly shows the correlation between the sexual etiology of the neuroses and the theory of constancy (Origins, p.
87
CARDINAL
).
In this regard, the phenomenon of anxiety very clearly
manifests the tangible presence of quantity; anxiety is quantity laid
bare. The mechanical aspect of quantity is ultimately less important
than its intensive aspect.
We must go further: all the “mechanisms” described at this period have already been raised to the level of what
Freud
ORG
will soon call work: dream-work, work of mourning, etc. All the dynamic
concepts—defense, resistance, repression, transference <31>—are
deciphered in the work of the neurosis, in “the psychical elaboration of
the libido,” as we said above. By the same token the energy concepts
are already correlative to the whole activity of interpretation brought
into play by the etiology of the neuroses.
<
31>
TIME
The correlation between clinical and economic concepts is very noticeable in
Freud
ORG
’s early remarks about grief, mortification, self-reproach on the one
hand and defense, conflict, resistance, repression on the other
(Origins, pp.
126-31
CARDINAL
,
136
CARDINAL
,
146
CARDINAL
,
164
CARDINAL
). Particularly to be noted is the definition of grief or mourning as
the “longing for something that is lost.” The correlation between
mourning and melancholy has already been made: “melancholia consists in
mourning over loss of libido” (ibid., p.
103
CARDINAL
).
Finally, the theory of constancy and its anatomical translation furnish little support to the edifice; when
the “Project
ORG
,” barely drafted, succumbs to doubt, only the clinical observations on the neuroses will stand firm. <
32
CARDINAL
> The sexual etiology of the neuroses was actually a much better
guide than any mechanism or quantitative system. From the beginning
Freud
ORG
had “the distinct impression” that he had “touched on one of the great secrets of nature” (Letter 18 of
1894
DATE
).
<
32
CARDINAL
> Origins, pp.
133
CARDINAL
,
134
CARDINAL
. “Perhaps in the end I may have to learn to content myself with the clinical explanation of the neuroses” (p.
137
CARDINAL
).
However,
one
CARDINAL
should not conclude from this
second
ORDINAL
set of remarks that the constancy principle and the quantitative
hypothesis are liquidated along with the pseudoanatomical translation.
Affects will continue to be treated as displaceable or bound
“quantities” joined to ideas, and the notion of cathexis will remain
closely linked with this strange quantity that is never measured. It may
even be thought that the discovery and practice of the method of free
association, which was substituted for the cathartic method, rather
reinforced the idea that the psychism presents some definite agency. The
conviction that the psychism is not a chaos but presents a hidden order
not only gave rise to the method of interpretation but also reinforced
the deterministic explanation; as
Jones
PERSON
says toward the beginning of his book, “
Freud
ORG
never abandoned determinism for teleology.” The constancy principle was
the instrument by which a theory of desire or wishing, with its ideas
of purpose, aim, and intention, remained subordinated to a deterministic
hypothesis (
Jones
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
366
CARDINAL
). At the end of
Chapter 3
LAW
we will account for this coincidence between the idea of interpretation
as the relation of meaning to meaning and the idea of order and system.
Because of this coincidence the principle of constancy, conceived as
the self-regulation of a psychical system, will outlast its expression
in terms of neurons: for a long time the reality principle will be
looked upon as a complication and a detour; it will be seriously
challenged only by the death instinct; in the face of death, life will
present itself as
Eros
LOC
. Having reached this ultimate phase of the metapsychology, one may then wonder whether the
Freudian
NORP
theory has not restored the
Naturphilosophie
PERSON
which the school of
Helmholtz
PERSON
endeavored to overthrow, and
Goethe’s Weltanschauung
ORG
which the young
Freud
ORG
had admired so much. If so, then
Freud
ORG
will have brought to pass the prophecy he made about himself: to return to philosophy by way of medicine and psychology.
39
CARDINAL
.
Jones
ORG
,
1
DATE
,
45
CARDINAL
.
40
CARDINAL
. “I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route [i.e.
medicine] at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my
original ambition, before I knew what I was intended to do in the world”
(Origins, p.
141
CARDINAL
). On
Freud
ORG
and Goethe, cf.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
43
CARDINAL
.
Chapter 2
LAW
: Energetics and Hermeneutics in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
The difficult
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
(
Traumdeutung
PERSON
) is unquestionably the heir to
the “Project” of 1895
LAW
; left unpublished by
Freud
ORG
himself,
the “Project”
ORG
found an outlet in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. However,
at least two
CARDINAL
changes have supervened. The
first
ORDINAL
is so great that no one could overlook it: the psychical apparatus of
The Interpretation of Dreams functions
WORK_OF_ART
without any anatomical reference; it is a psychical apparatus. From this point on, dreams impose a theme that may be called
Herbartian
NORP
: there are dream “thoughts”; a dream is the accomplishment or fulfillment (
Erfiillung
PERSON
) of a desire or wish (
Wunsch
PERSON
); that is to say, it is something “psychical” or “ideational.”
Hence The Interpretation of Dreams no longer speaks
WORK_OF_ART
1
CARDINAL
. I shall frequently cite passages from
The Interpretation of Dreams so
WORK_OF_ART
as to propose to
French
NORP
readers a more exact translation of the original text. The title
itself, which directly concerns the theory of hermeneutics, should be
translated literally:
Deutung
PERSON
does not mean science but interpretation. The
French
NORP
translation to which I refer—with the reservation that I may correct it—is that of
I. Meyerson
PERSON
,
La Science
ORG
des reves (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1950
DATE
), translated from the
7th
ORDINAL
German
NORP
edition; I also indicate in parentheses the pagination of the edition of
the Club fran$ais du livre
ORG
,
1963
DATE
. [Translator’s note: By the author’s directive, nearly all references to the
French
NORP
editions are omitted and all quotations are taken from
James Strachey’s
PERSON
translation in
the Standard Edition
ORG
,
Vols
ORG
.
4
CARDINAL
and
5
CARDINAL
.]
2
CARDINAL
. The evolution of the theory may be followed in the letters to Fliess written after
the “Project”
ORG
; see particularly
Letters 39
PERSON
and
52
DATE
, which are still close to
the “Project
ORG
.” It is important for our later discussion to note that the theory of
the hallucinatory character of dreams—a theory already introduced in
the “Project” (The Origins of Psychoanalysis
EVENT
, p.
401)—
CARDINAL
preceded the more general thesis that dreams are a wish-fulfillment: Letters
28
CARDINAL
,
45
DATE
, and
62
CARDINAL
; cf. Anzieu, L’Auto-analyse, pp.
82-129
CARDINAL
.
of cathected neurons but of cathected ideas. This first change
entails another one which, though less visible, is perhaps of greater
importance for an epistemological reflection on “models”: the schema of
the psychical apparatus oscillates between a real representation, as was
the machine of
the “Project,
ORG
” and a figurative representation, as will be the later schemata of the
topography. We shall try to understand this ambiguity and, if possible,
justify it to a certain extent.
These
two
CARDINAL
changes disclose a more radical transformation affecting the
relationship between the topographic-economic explanation on the one
hand and interpretation on the other. In the “
Project”
LAW
that relation was left unclear: the interpretation of symptoms, which
arose from observations of transference in neurotic patients, guided the
construction of the system without itself being the-matized within the
system. As a result the systematic explanation seemed to be independent
of the concrete work of the analyst and of the patient’s own work on his
neurosis. Such is not the case in
The Interpretation of Dreams:
WORK_OF_ART
here the systematic explanation is placed at the end of a process of
work whose own rules have been elaborated; the express aim of the
explanation is to present a schematic transcription of what goes on in
the dream-work that is accessible only in and through the work of
interpretation. The explanation, therefore, is explicitly subordinated
to interpretation; it is not by accident that this book is called
Die Traumdeutung
PERSON
,
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
.
THE DREAM-WORK AND
THE WORK OF
ORG
EXEGESIS
The thesis that dreams have meaning is
first
ORDINAL
of all a polemical thesis which
Freud
ORG
defends on
two
CARDINAL
fronts. On the one hand, it is opposed to the notion that dreams are a
chance play of representations, a waste product of mental life, and that
the sole problem concerning them is their lack of meaning. From this
first
ORDINAL
point of view, to say that dreams have meaning is to assert that they
are an intelligible, and even intellectual, operation of man; to
understand them is to experience their intelligibility. On
the
other hand, the thesis is opposed to any premature organic explanation
of dreams; the thesis signifies that one can always substitute for the
dream account another account, with a semantics and a syntax, and that
these
two
CARDINAL
accounts are comparable to one another as
two
CARDINAL
texts. It sometimes happens that
Freud
ORG
compares, more or less appropriately, this relation of text to text to
that of translating from one language to another; we will return to the
exactitude of the analogy later. For the present let us take the analogy
as unambiguous affirmation that interpretation moves from a less
intelligible to a more intelligible meaning. The same may be said of the
analogy of the picture puzzle or rebus, which is another example of the
relation of obscure text to clear text.
The comparison of
meaning to a text enables one to eliminate what remains equivocal in the
notion of symptom; a symptom, to be sure, is already an effect-sign and
presents the mixed structure we wish to delimit in this study; but this
mixed structure is more clearly revealed by dreams than by symptoms.
Belonging as they
3
CARDINAL
. “The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted [einer
Deutung
PERSON
jahig sind], . . . My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at
once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to
every theory of dreams with the exception of
Schemer
ORG
’s; for ‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ [S/nn] to
it—that is, replacing [ersetzeri] it by something which fits [sich . . .
einfiigt] into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity
and importance equal to the rest” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
100
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
96
CARDINAL
). Further on, at the beginning of
Chapter 3
LAW
,
Freud
ORG
compares the situation of the analyst who has surmounted the
first
ORDINAL
difficulties of dream interpretation to that of an explorer who comes
upon an open view after passing through a narrow defile: “We find
ourselves in the full daylight of a sudden discovery” (wir stehen in der
Klarheit
PERSON
einer plotzlichen
Erkenntnis
PERSON
) (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
122
CARDINAL
; this phrase is omitted in the
French
NORP
translation, p.
94
CARDINAL
[
77
CARDINAL
]). Thus dreams are seen to be “psychical phenomena of complete validity
[vollgultiger]—fulfillments of wishes [Wunsch]; they can be inserted
[einzureiheri] into the chain of intelligible [uns verstandlichen]
waking mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated
activity of the mind [geistige]” (ibid.). On the comparison of
interpretation to a translation from one language into another, or to
the solution of a rebus, see
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
-84; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
277
CARDINAL
-78.
4
CARDINAL
. Chronologically the idea of symptoms, which is common to Breuer and
Freud
ORG
, is certainly
first
ORDINAL
; methodologically, however, the reversal of priority is essential:
“Though my own line of approach to the subject of dreams was determined
by my previous work on the psychology of the do to discourse, dreams
reveal that symptoms have a meaning; thus dreams enable
one
CARDINAL
to coordinate the normal and the pathological within what might be called a general semiology.
But
is it possible to maintain interpretation on this unambiguous level
where relations would be those of meaning to meaning? Interpretation
cannot be developed without calling into play concepts of an entirely
different order, energy concepts. It is impossible to achieve the
first
ORDINAL
task of interpretation—viz. to discover the thoughts, ideas, or wishes
that are “fulfilled” in a disguised way— without considering the
“mechanisms” that constitute the dream-work and bring about the
“transposition” or “distortion” (Entstel-lung) of the dream-thoughts
into the manifest content. This study of the dream-work, according to
one of the methodological texts of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, constitutes the
second
ORDINAL
task. <
33><34
CARDINAL
> The distinction between the
two
CARDINAL
tasks has only a pedagogical value, however: the discovery of the
unconscious dream-thoughts shows that they are the same as the thoughts
of waking life; all the strangeness of dreams is centered, rather, upon
the dream-work. Transposition or distortion, in which the dream-work
roughly consists, splits dreams off from the rest of psychical life,
whereas the revealing of the dream-thoughts relates dreams to waking
life.
neuroses, I had not intended to make use of the latter as a
basis of reference in the present work. Nevertheless I am constantly
being driven to do so, instead of proceeding, as I should have wished,
in the contrary direction and using dreams as a means of approach to the
psychology of the neuroses” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
593
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
588
CARDINAL
). The structural identity of neurotic symptoms and dreams as both being
“formations of compromise” will be established only at the end of the
topography (“
Traumbildung
PERSON
und
Symptombildung
PERSON
,”
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
611-13
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
605
CARDINAL
-08). But the interpretation of symptoms as symbols, in the Studies on
Hysteria
GPE
, is the main link; cf. below, p.
97
CARDINAL
, n.
15
CARDINAL
.
<
34
CARDINAL
> See the important methodological text that terminates
Chapter 6
LAW
: “
Two
CARDINAL
separate functions may be distinguished in mental activity during the
construction of a dream; the production [Herstellung] of the
dream-thoughts, and their transformation into the content of the dream.”
The dream-thoughts do not have a special nature. On the other hand, the
dream-work is peculiar to dreams; this activity “is completely
different [from waking thought] qualitatively and for that reason not
immediately comparable with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in
any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
510
CARDINAL
-11; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
506
CARDINAL
-07). This theme is taken up again in
Chapter 7
LAW
:
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
597
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
592
CARDINAL
. The translation of the word
Entstellung
PERSON
, by which
Freud globally
ORG
designates the dream-work, and which covers displacement, condensation, and other procedures, is difficult: it contains
two
CARDINAL
ideas, that of a violent change of place, and that of a deformation,
disfiguring, or disguise which makes something unrecognizable. Both the
traditional
French
NORP
translation, transposition, and the
English
NORP
translation, “distortion” (distorsion is also a good
French
NORP
expression), retain only one of the intentions of the original term. That is why I write: “transposition” or “distortion.”
Moreover, the
first
ORDINAL
task, which in the course of the book is not clearly distinguished from the
second
ORDINAL
, cannot be accomplished to any great extent without recourse to
economic concepts. To find the dream-thoughts is, in fact, to follow out
a certain regressive path which, beyond the present impressions and
bodily excitations, the memories of waking life or the
day
DATE
’s residues, or the actual wish for sleep, discloses the unconscious,
that is to say, the earliest wishes. It is our childhood that rises to
the surface, with its forgotten, checked, repressed impulses, and along
with our childhood that of mankind, recapitulated in that of the
individual. Dreams provide access to a basic phenomenon that will
constantly preoccupy us in this book, the phenomenon of regression, of
which we shall shortly better understand not only the temporal but the
topological and dynamic aspects. In regression, we are led from concepts
of meaning to concepts of force by this relation to the abolished, the
forbidden, the repressed—this close connection between the archaic and
the oneiric; for the realm of dream-fantasy is a realm of desire. If
dreams are drawn toward discourse because of their narrative aspect,
their relation to wishes or desires throws them back on the side of
energy, conatus, appetition, will to power, libido, or whatever one
wishes to call it. Thus dreams, inasmuch as they are the expression of
wishes, lie at the intersection of meaning and force.
Interpretation (
Deutung
PERSON
), which has not yet become identified with the work of deciphering
correlative to the dream-work, and which has been concerned more with
psychical content than with mechanism, nevertheless has begun to receive
its proper structure, and this structure is a mixed one. On the one
hand, in terms of meaning, interpretation is a movement from the
manifest to the latent. To interpret is to displace the origin of
meaning to another region. The topography, at least in its static and
properly topographi-
cal form, will be the pictorial
representation of this movement of interpretation from the apparent
meaning toward another locality of meaning. But even at this
first
ORDINAL
level it is impossible to look upon
Deutung
PERSON
as a simple relation between ciphered and deciphered discourse; it is
not enough to say that the unconscious is another discourse, an
unintelligible discourse. In its transposition or distortion (
Verstellung
GPE
) of the manifest content into the latent content, interpretation uncovers another distortion, that of desires into images;
Freud
ORG
investigates this distortion in
Chapter 4
LAW
. To use an expression from
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
,” a dream is already a “vicissitude of instinct.”
But it is impossible to thematize this
Verstellung
GPE
more precisely without proceeding to the
second
ORDINAL
task of accounting for the mechanisms of the dream-work (
Traumarbeit
GPE
), which is the subject of
Chapter 6
LAW
. More clearly than the
first
ORDINAL
, this
second
ORDINAL
task requires combining
two
CARDINAL
universes of discourse, the discourse of meaning and the discourse of
force. To say that a dream is the fulfillment of a repressed wish is to
put together
two
CARDINAL
notions which belong to different orders: fulfillment (Erfullung), which belongs to the discourse of meaning (as attested by
Husserl
PERSON
’s use of the term), and repression {
Verdrdngung
GPE
), which belongs to the discourse of force. The notion of
Verstellung
GPE
, which combines the
two
CARDINAL
universes of discourse, expresses the fusion of these
two
CARDINAL
concepts, for a disguise is a type of manifestation and, at the same
time, a distortion that alters that manifestation: it is the violence
done to the meaning. Thus the relation of the hidden to the shown in the
notion of disguise requires a deformation, or disfiguration, which can
only be stated as a compromise of forces. The concept of “censorship,”
correlative to the concept of distortion, belongs to this same mixed
discourse: distortion is the effect, censorship the cause. But what does
censorship mean? The word is well chosen: on the one hand, censorship
manifests itself at the level of a text on which it imposes blanks, word
substitutions, softened expressions, allusions, tricks of arrangement
—with suspect or subversive items being displaced and hidden in
harmless, out-of-the-way spots; on the other hand, censorship is the
expression of a power, more precisely of a political power, which works
against the opposition by striking at its right of expression. In
the idea of censorship the
two
CARDINAL
systems of language are very closely interwoven: censorship alters a
text only when it represses a force, and it represses a forbidden force
only by disturbing the expression of that force.
What we have
just said of the notions of disguise, distortion, and censorship, which
together characterize the “transposition” effected by the dream-work, is
still more evident if we consider the diverse mechanisms separately;
none of them can be enunciated without recourse to that same mixed
language.
On the one hand, the dream-work is the inverse of the
analyst’s work of deciphering and is homogeneous therefore with the
mental operations of interpretation which trace it back. Thus the
two
CARDINAL
main processes studied in
Chapter 6 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, “condensation
” (Verdichtungsarbeit) and “displacement”
WORK_OF_ART
(Ver-schiebungsarbeit), are meaningful operations comparable to rhetorical procedures.
Freud
ORG
himself compares condensation to an abbreviated, laconic turn of
phrase, to a lacunary expression; it is at the same time a formation of
composite expressions each of which belongs to several trains of
thought. He compares displacement to a shift away from the central
point, or again to an inversion of emphasis or value, whereby the
various ideas of the latent content transfer their “psychical
intensities” to the manifest content. These
two
CARDINAL
processes attest, on the plane of meaning, to an “overdetermination”
which calls for interpretation. Each of the elements of the
dream-content is said to be overdetermined when it is “represented in
the dream-thoughts many times over.” Overdetermination also governs,
though in different ways, condensation and displacement. This is clear
in the case of condensation, where the problem is to set out or make
explicit a multiplicity of meanings through free association. But
displacement, which concerns psychical intensities rather than the
number of ideas, also requires overdetermination: to create new values,
to displace interests, to “disregard” the point of intensity,
displacement must follow the path of overdetermination.
But this overdetermination, stated in the language of meaning, is
6
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
289
CARDINAL
(mehrfach in den
Traumgedanken
PERSON
vertreten);
SE
PERSON
,
4
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
.
the counterpart of processes stated in the language of
force: condensation means compression; displacement means transference
of forces:
It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the
dream-work a psychical force [eine psychische Macht] is operating which
on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of
their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination,
creates from elements of low psychical value new values [Wertigkeiten],
which afterwards find their way into the dream-content. If that is so, a
transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the
process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the
difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the
dream-thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming is
nothing less than the essential portion of the dream-work; and it
deserves to be described as “dream-displacement.” Dream-displacement and
dream-condensation are the
two
CARDINAL
governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form [Gestaltung] assumed by dreams. <
35>
TIME
<
35
DATE
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Thus there is the same relation between overdetermination (or
“multiple determination”) and displacement as there is between meaning
and force.
The same mixed discourse is required by a
third
ORDINAL
process which gives dreams their specific characteristic as “scenes” or
“pictures”; whereas condensation and displacement accounted for the
alteration of themes or “content,” “representation” (Darstellung)
denotes another aspect of regression that
Freud
ORG
calls formal regression (to distinguish it from temporal regression, of
which we have already spoken, and from topographical regression, which
we shall speak of later). <
36
CARDINAL
> Such representation lends itself to description in terms of
meaning; thus one will note the breakdown of syntax, the replacement of
logical relations by pictorial equivalents, the representation of
negation through the union of contraries in a single object, the
resemblance of the manifest content to a mime or rebus, and in general
the return to concrete pictorial expression. Putting aside for the
moment the question of sexual symbolism, which has been too much the
center of the discussion and whose exact place we shall see later, let
us pose in its full extent the problem that
Freud
ORG
himself describes as “regard for representability.” In this connection,
what is seen to characterize dreams is the regression beyond memory
images to the hallucinatory revival of perception. Thus
Freud
ORG
says that “in regression the fabric [das Gefiige] of the dream-thoughts
is resolved into its raw material.” 11 But this regression to images,
just described in terms of meaning as the hallucinatory revival of
perception, is at the same time an economic phenomenon that can only be
stated in terms of “changes in the cathexes of energy attaching to the
different systems.”
<
36
CARDINAL
> On the
three
CARDINAL
forms of regression—formal, topographical, and temporal
—see GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
554
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
(addition of
1914
DATE
).
One
CARDINAL
will object, before going any further, that the Traum-deutung is burdened here with an illusion that
Freud
ORG
was to abandon soon after the publication of his major book. It is not
difficult to recognize in the background of this quasi-hallucinatory
theory of dreams, just as in
the “Project” of 1895
EVENT
, the belief in the reality of the childhood scene of seduction. The
perceptual traces corresponding to that scene are eager for revival and
exercise an attraction on the repressed thoughts, themselves struggling
to find expression: “On this view a dream might be described as a
substitute [Ersatz] for an infantile scene modified by being transferred
onto a recent experience.”
13
CARDINAL
According to the pattern of the infantile scene, which
Freud
ORG
regards as a model, the residual core of dreams would consist in a
“complete hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptual systems. What we have
described, in our analysis of the dream-work, as ‘regard for
representability’ might be brought into connection with the selective
attraction exercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by
the dream-thoughts.”
These texts clearly show that
Freud
ORG
regarded the predominance
10
CARDINAL
. “Die Riicksicht auf
Darstellbarkeit
PERSON
,”
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
344
CARDINAL
ff.;
“Considerations of Representability
ORG
,” SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
339
CARDINAL
ff.
of pictorial representation in the dream-work as the
hallucinatory revival of a primitive scene that had actually been
perceived. The objection that may be raised about this assumption,
however, is aimed more against the topography of
Chapter 7
LAW
than against the description of representation in the context of the
dream-work. There is no doubt that by interpreting the infantile scene
as a real memory
Freud
ORG
is forced to confuse fantasies with the mnemic traces of real
perceptions, in which case topographical regression is a regression to
perception and the proper dimension of the imaginary is lost. We shall
come back to this later. For our present purpose it is important only to
notice that formal regression, which characterizes “pictorial
representation,” that is to say, the return from the logical to the
figurative, raises a problem analogous to the problem of condensation
and displacement: representation likewise is a distortion—and
consequently an obstructing of direct expression, the forced
substitution of
one
CARDINAL
mode of expression for another. In all
three
CARDINAL
cases, therefore—condensation, displacement, and representation—the dream is a work. That is why the
Deutung
QUANTITY
corresponding to them is also a work, which, in order to be thematized,
requires a mixed language that is neither purely linguistic nor purely
energic.
In the notion that interpretation is a work we have the
key to a difficulty with which I shall terminate this study of the main
concepts of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, before proceeding to the topography of
Chapter 7
LAW
. The difficulty has to do with
Freud
ORG
’s use of the notions of symbol and symbolic interpretation.
This use is at
first
ORDINAL
rather disconcerting: on the one hand
Freud
ORG
opposes his own interpretation to a symbolic interpretation, and on the
other hand he gives an important place, precisely within the framework
of representation, to the sexual symbolization of dreams, with which the
book itself has too hastily been identified. A clarification of this
point is of the greatest importance to us, for in the vocabulary of our “
Problematic
NORP
” the term “symbol” stands for all double-meaning expressions and is the
pivotal point of interpretation. If a symbol is the meaning of meaning,
then the entire
Freudian
NORP
hermeneutics should be a hermeneutics of symbols in-
asmuch as they are the language of desire. In fact, however,
Freud
ORG
gives the notion of symbol a much more restricted extension.
15
CARDINAL
. A systematic study of
Freud
ORG
’s notion of symbol remains to be done.
M. Guy Blanchet
PERSON
, who has begun such a study, has drawn my attention to the
first
ORDINAL
Freudian
NORP
conception of symbol, that in Studies on
Hysteria
GPE
. In
the “Preliminary Communication”
EVENT
of
1892
DATE
(the subtitle of the
first
ORDINAL
chapter of the Studies) the symbolic connection designates the hidden
relation between the determining cause and the hysterical symptom; the
symbolic connection is thus distinct from the manifest connection. The
same text establishes, for the
first
ORDINAL
time, a parallel between this symbolic connection and the dream process. Limited at
first
ORDINAL
to the sufferings or pains of hysterical patients, this connection is
gradually extended to all hysterical symptoms by means of the relation,
gradually brought to light, between symbolization and memory; symbols
thereby take on the value of recollection of pain, and
Freud
ORG
uses the expression “mnemic symbols” (Studies on
Hysteria
GPE
,
SE
PERSON
,
2
CARDINAL
,
90-93
DATE
, etc.). A symbol is thus a mnemic substitute for a traumatic scene the
memory of which has been suppressed. If it is true, as was already said
in
the “Preliminary Communication
ORG
,” that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences
” (
WORK_OF_ART
GW
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
86
DATE
; SE,
2,1
CARDINAL
), mnemic symbols are the means by which the trauma continues to exist
in the form of symptoms. Mnemic symbols, unlike the (chronic) “mnemic
residues,” are deformed or converted, in the sense that
one
CARDINAL
speaks of hysterical conversion. Symbolization therefore is coextensive
with the whole field of distortion connected with repression (the
latter being identified at this period with defense).
The “Project” of 1895
EVENT
still bears the imprint of this early conception of symbol as a mnemic substitute for a repressed trauma (Origins, pp.
406-07
CARDINAL
); thus symbolization tends to denote any substitute formation in cases
where resistance is exercised against the return of the repressed
memory.
This
first
ORDINAL
sense of the word “symbol” is therefore wider than that in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, for it covers everything later called transposition or distortion (
Entstellung
PERSON
). However, the intermediary role assigned to idiomatic expressions in
the formation of hysterical symptoms foreshadows the future restriction
of symbolism to cultural stereotypes: “It is as though there were an
intention to express the mental state by means of a physical one; and
linguistic usage affords a bridge by which this can be effected” (a
lecture of
January 1893
DATE
, “On the Psychical Mechanism of
Hysterical Phenomena
ORG
,” SE,
3
DATE
,
34
DATE
). Thus the facial neuralgia of a female patient treated conjointly by
Breuer
ORG
and
Freud
ORG
symbolized an insult, felt as a slap in the face; another patient, who
suffered from the feeling that she could not “take a single step
forward” in life, symbolized in the pains of her legs—pains which were
already present from other sources—her sense of helplessness. In the
Studies on
Hysteria Freud
PERSON
saw therefore that symbolization is not only a distortion of the body
through fantasies but a revival of the primitive meaning of words, as he
will state in the
1910
DATE
paper “
The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words
WORK_OF_ART
” (SE, II), which we shall study further on.
In his survey of previous dream theories,
Freud
ORG
encounters
two
CARDINAL
popular methods of dream interpretation which he opposes to one another
as being “essentially different”: symbolic interpretation and the
decoding method. “The
first
ORDINAL
of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and
seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in
certain respects analogous to the original
one
CARDINAL
. This is ‘
symbolic’
PRODUCT
dream-interpreting; and it inevitably breaks down when faced by dreams
which are not merely unintelligible but also confused.” <37> This
was the method
Joseph
PERSON
used in interpreting the
Pharaoh
PERSON
’s dream; it was also used by the novelist
Jensen
PERSON
in his Gradiva—which
Freud
ORG
was to comment on
several years later—when
DATE
he attributed to the hero of his story a number of artificial but easily interpretable dreams. The
second
ORDINAL
procedure, the
Chiffrier
ORG
-methode or decoding method, “treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in
which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known
meaning, in accordance with a fixed key.” <
38><39
PRODUCT
> This mechanical term-for-term translation has nothing at all to do
with the notions of displacement and condensation, but at least it is
closer than the symbolic method is to the psychoanalytic method inasmuch
as it is an analysis “en detail and not en masse."
18
CARDINAL
Like the decoding method, analysis treats dreams as having a “composite
character,” as “conglomerates of psychical formations.” <
40
QUANTITY
> Thus, what approximates analysis to the Chiffrier-verfahren and
separates it from the symbolic method is the method of free association.
<37>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
101
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
4
CARDINAL
,
96-97
DATE
.
<
38
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
102
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
97
DATE
.
<
39
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
108
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
104
CARDINAL
; in
French
NORP
in the text.
<
40
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Does this mean that the idea of symbol is excluded from the field of analysis along with the idea of the symbolic method? A
second
ORDINAL
allusion, again a negative one, suggests that there is room for symbols, an idea the succeeding editions of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
will pursue with great consistency. This allusion is to be found in the discussion of
Schemer
ORG
, the only person from whom
Freud
ORG
says he retained anything on this subject. The discussion occurs in the context of the somatic theories of dreams.
Schemer
PERSON
is
still held prisoner within that narrow context, but he
rightly saw that “the dream-work, when the imagination [Phantasies is
set free from the shackles of
daytime
DATE
, seeks to give a symbolic representation [symbolisch darzustellen] of
the nature of the organ from which the stimulus arises and of the nature
of the stimulus itself.” Thus we are. already involved in
representation; in spite of his narrow starting point (stimulus and
bodily organ),
Schemer
ORG
recognized under the name of symbol the work of representation that
tends to derealize the body, to make it, in the proper sense of the
term, fantastic.
One
CARDINAL
drawback to this method of interpretation is the same as that found in
the method employed in antiquity, with its generalized correspondences;
an even greater defect, however, is that this manner of “fantasying”
(phantasieren) the body reduces dreams to a useless activity. One must
relate the body symbolism to the activity of “disposing of the stimulus”
and hence to the complex interplay between the underlying forces that
are the veritable sources of dreams.
In the series of re-editions the place allotted to symbolism kept expanding, but always within a subordinate setting,
first
ORDINAL
in the context of “typical dreams” (
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
5
CARDINAL
) and then, after
1914
DATE
, under the heading of “representation
” (Ch. 6)
WORK_OF_ART
. What attracted
Freud
ORG
’s attention to the peculiar meaning of symbolism was the fact that
certain dreams are typical (dreams of being naked, dreams of the death
of persons of whom the dreamer is fond, and so on). Very early
Freud
ORG
remarks that these dreams are the hardest to approach by the method of interpretation. Gradually the conclusion is drawn
21
CARDINAL
. Prior to the critical
Standard Edition by Strachey
ORG
, it was impossible to distinguish the successive additions from the
1900
DATE
text. It is important to know that the essential content of
Section E of Chapter 6
LAW
, the section devoted to
“Representation by Symbols in Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
,” was added in
1909, 1911
DATE
, and
1914
DATE
, with still more paragraphs or notes added in subsequent editions (
1919, 1921, 1922, 1930
DATE
). In the
second
ORDINAL
and
third
ORDINAL
editions, these additions were included in Section D (“
Typical Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
”) of
Chapter 5
LAW
. It was only in the
1914
DATE
edition that symbolism was transferred to the context of the theory of
representation, a displacement that places symbolism in its true light.
In the
first
ORDINAL
paragraph (
1925
DATE
) of this new section,
Freud
ORG
acknowledges his debt to
Stekel
PERSON
’s work, Die Sprache des Traumes (
1911
DATE
); he had already done so in the preface to the
third
ORDINAL
edition. A serious study of the development of
Freud
ORG
’s thought should also take note of the influence of
Herbert Silberer
PERSON
that symbolism poses a specific problem, although there is no
special symbolic function that deserves to figure among the procedures
of the dream-work. All the examples of symbols in dreams have led
to
the same conclusion, namely that there is no necessity to assume that
any peculiar symbolizing activity of the mind is operating in the
dream-work, but that dreams make use of any symbolizations which are
already present in unconscious thinking, because they fit in better with
the requirements of dream-construction on account of their
representability [
Darstellbar
PERSON
-keit] and also because as a rule they escape censorship. <41><42>
and
Havelock Ellis
PERSON
, as well as of
Freud
ORG
’s close collaboration during this period with
Otto Rank
PERSON
, who published
the Myth of the Birth of the Hero
WORK_OF_ART
in
1909
DATE
; in the
fourth
ORDINAL
,
fifth
ORDINAL
,
sixth
ORDINAL
, and
seventh
ORDINAL
editions
Freud
ORG
included
two
CARDINAL
essays by
Rank
PERSON
entitled
“Dreams and Creative Writing”
WORK_OF_ART
and
“Dreams and Myths”
WORK_OF_ART
as appendices to
Chapter 6
LAW
. There would also appear to be an undoubted influence by
Karl Abraham
PERSON
, with his work
Traum
NORP
und My thus (
1909
DATE
), and by
Ferenczi
PERSON
, who published a number of articles on dreams
between the years 1910 and 1917
DATE
. Finally, such a study should include the whole nexus of relations between
Freud
ORG
and
Jung
GPE
. This conflict is just as important for an understanding of the re-editions of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
as for an understanding of
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
which appeared in
1913
DATE
,
the year
DATE
of the break with
Jung
PERSON
.
<
42
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
354
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
349
CARDINAL
. This is the earliest mention of the relation between representation and symbolization in the whole of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
. The passage was present from the
first
ORDINAL
edition of
1900
DATE
and may be regarded as the initial nucleus of all later developments concerned with
the “Representation by Symbols in Dreams
ORG
.” The transfer of this development, starting with the
fourth
ORDINAL
edition of
1914
DATE
, to the context of the processes of representation (Section E in Chapter
6
CARDINAL
) is the logical outcome of what had been seen from the beginning. The sentence we have just quoted was in fact the concluding
one
CARDINAL
of the section on representability in
Chapter 6,
LAW
Section D; it thus served as a lead into the newly constituted
Section E of Chapter 6
LAW
in
1914
DATE
.
That sentence gives the key to the rest: representation poses a problem, and to account for it
Freud
ORG
constructed a whole metapsychology of regression; symbolization does
not pose a problem because in symbolism the work has already been done
elsewhere; dreams make use of symbolism, they do not elaborate it.
One
CARDINAL
thus understands why the dreamer does not produce associations in
connection with his typical dreams: in his dream he has merely utilized,
as
in the use of a common expression, symbolic fragments that have fallen
to the sphere of the trodden commonplace, phantoms that he has
momentarily brought to life.
One
CARDINAL
is reminded of the
Husserlian
NORP
notion of “sedimentation”;
Freud
ORG
grants it: “The question is bound to arise of whether many of these
symbols do not occur with a permanently fixed meaning, like the
‘grammalogues’ in shorthand; and we shall feel tempted to draw up a new
‘dream-book’ on the decoding principle.”
Thus symbols have moved to the other side of the border that at
first
ORDINAL
separated the symbolic method from the decoding method. But there they
receive a precise place as a stereotyped code. It is no longer
surprising that this general symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is
also to be found in unconscious ideation among the people, in folklore
and myths, legends and linguistic idioms, proverbs and current jokes—and
“to a more complete extent than in dreams.” In making use of these
symbols the dreamer but follows the paths traced out by the unconscious.
Here we again come upon
Schemer
PERSON
’s symbolism and the symbolic extravagances of neurotics: “Wherever
neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which
all humanity passed in the earliest periods of civilization—paths of
whose continued existence
today
DATE
, under the thinnest of veils, evidence is to be found in linguistic usages, superstitions and customs.”
This
is the reason why analytic interpretation must be supplemented by a
genetic interpretation. Symbols have a special overdetermination which
is not the product of the dream-work but a
pregiven
CARDINAL
fact of culture: they are often the vestige of a conceptual and
linguistic identity now lost. Hence the warning to the reader or
overzealous practitioner of psychoanalysis not to reduce the trans-
23
DATE
.
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
356
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
351
CARDINAL
. This
1909
DATE
text links up with the remarks of the Studies on
Hysteria
PERSON
concerning the role of idiomatic expressions in the constitution of the
symbolic relation. This is doubtless the area, as we suggested above,
in n. 15, where we must look for the continuity of the
Freudian
NORP
conception of symbol. A study of
Lecture
NORP
X of the
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
on
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
(“
Symbolism in Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
”) (
1917
DATE
), to which we shall return in
Chapter 4
LAW
of the last part of our work, will confirm this interpretation.
lating of dreams to a translating of symbols, but rather to
regard symbolism as an auxiliary: the proper path of interpretation is
the dreamer’s associations and not the pregiven connections in the
symbols themselves. Finally, symbolic interpretation and analytic
interpretation remain
two
CARDINAL
distinct techniques and the
first
ORDINAL
is subordinate to the
second
ORDINAL
“as an auxiliary method.”
Was
Freud
ORG
right in restricting the notion of symbol to these stenographic signs?
Should not a distinction be made between levels of actuality in symbols?
In addition to the commonplace symbols, worn with use, at the end of
their course, and having nothing but a past; and even in addition to the
symbols in use, useful and utilized, which have a past and a present
and serve in the clockwork of a given society as a token for the nexus
of social pacts, are there not also new symbolic creations that serve as
vehicles of new meanings? In other words, are symbols merely vestiges?
Are they not also the dawn of meaning? Regardless of the outcome of this
discussion— which we will return to at the proper moment—it is clear
why, in the
Freudian
NORP
vocabulary and also in the framework of the economic explanation, there
is no problem of symbolization, whereas there is a problem of pictorial
representation. But even within the narrow limits in which
Freud
ORG
confines symbols the problem is not exhausted, for the psychoanalysis of myths, which we will meet with in the
second
ORDINAL
part of this “
Analytic
WORK_OF_ART
,” is elaborated precisely on the symbolic level. It is not accidental that the interpretation of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
and
Hamlet
ORG
, which we shall later discuss in detail, is elaborated in relation to the analysis of “typical dreams.”
THE “PSYCHOLOGY
PRODUCT
” OF CHAPTER 7
How does the systematization in
Chapter 7
LAW
relate to the economic and hermeneutic concepts developed in the chapters preceding this difficult final one? '
Its relation to the rest of the work is complex: it is partly the elu-
27
CARDINAL
. It is remarkable that in the later editions the interpretation of the
Oedipus
LOC
myth was left in the section on “typical dreams” in
Chapter 5
LAW
(Section D) and was not transferred to the section on “representation by symbols”
(Section E of Chapter 6) after the major revision of 1914
WORK_OF_ART
. The analysis of the Oedipus theme remains in the subsection concerning typical
cidation,
by means of an “auxiliary representation,” of what has already been
elaborated and stated in implicit or confused terms; but it is also the
imposition of a theory that remains somewhat external to the material it
gathers together and coordinates. Hence the theory presents itself as
an addition to
the half economic, half hermeneutic
DATE
, more practiced than reflected network of conceptions that we have drawn from the work itself.
The presentation of the topography in
Chapter 7
LAW
is skillfully divided into
three
CARDINAL
episodes, which are interspersed with descriptive and clinical themes that tend to becloud the reading somewhat. In the
first
ORDINAL
, <
43><44> the
TIME
psychical apparatus is pictured spatially as functioning in both a progressive and a regressive direction; in the
second
ORDINAL
, <
45
CARDINAL
> the apparatus is viewed as an evolving system endowed with a temporal dimension; in the
third
ORDINAL
, <
46>
TIME
the apparatus is presented as having force and conflict in addition to space and time. This progression parallels the
one
CARDINAL
we tried to establish at the level of interpretation.
dreams containing death wishes, and more particularly, a child’s death wish against his father. Regarding the
Oedipus
LOC
myth,
Freud
ORG
was in fact more interested in the “sources of dreams” (the title of
Chapter 5
LAW
), namely their rootedness in childhood desires, than in the role of representation or symbolization in the legendary disguise.
<
44
DATE
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
-55; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
^
9
CARDINAL
.
<
45
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
570
CARDINAL
-78; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
564
CARDINAL
-72.
<
46
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
604-14
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
598
CARDINAL
-608.
Interpretation, we said, aims
first
ORDINAL
of all at locating the actual dream-thoughts, which we look for
first
ORDINAL
in the somatic excitations, then in the residues of
the previous day
DATE
, then in the wish to sleep. The topography serves to determine the region in which the dream-thoughts originate. This is the
first
ORDINAL
function of the topography in its purely static form.
The
topographical location of the wish to sleep, as compared with the wishes
assigned to dreams as their true origin, will make the problem quite
clear. It is well known that
Freud
ORG
assigns dreams a certain function with regard to sleep; the
wish-fulfillment that characterizes dreams is a substitute action which
protects sleep. <
47>
TIME
<
47>
TIME
“All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience
[Bequemlichkeits-'traume]: they serve the purpose of prolonging sleep
instead of waking up. breams are the guardians of sleep and not its
disturbers" (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
239
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
233
CARDINAL
).
So important is the wish for sleep that the transformation of
external stimuli into images and the entire derealization of the body,
of which the symbolic distortion described by
Schemer
ORG
is the counterpart, must be attributed to it. Certain texts would even
lead one to think that this wish is the dominant wish, since the
censorship admits only those interpretations of the stimuli that are
compatible with the wish to sleep. This would seem to take us back to
Aristotle
GPE
, for whom “a dream is thinking that persists (insofar as we are asleep)
in the state of sleep.” The solution of this difficulty is a
topographical
one
CARDINAL
: the wish to sleep is assigned to the preconscious system and the
underlying instinctual wishes that instigate dreams belong to the
unconscious system. That is why the precise relation between the
intermittent wish to sleep and the permanent wishes that seek an outlet
in dreams is left in suspense until the celebrated
Chapter 7
LAW
.
The subsidiary thesis in this discussion is that no wish—not
even the wish to sleep—is efficacious unless it is joined to the
“indestructible” and “so to say, immortal” desires that stem from our
unconscious and whose infantile character is attested by the neuroses.
32
CARDINAL
. ‘‘Thus the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrated
upon, and which, together with the dream-censorship and the ‘secondary
revision’ which I shall mention later, constitute the conscious ego’s
share in dreaming) must in every case be reckoned as
one
CARDINAL
of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfillment of that wish” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
240
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
234
CARDINAL
).
34
CARDINAL
. “I am unable to say what modification in the system Pcs. is brought
about by the state of sleep; but there can be no doubt that the
psychological characteristics of sleep are to be looked for essentially
in modifications in the cathexis [
Besetzungsverdnderung
PERSON
] of this particular system—a system that is also in control of access
to the power of movement, which is paralyzed during sleep. On the other
hand, nothing in the psychology of dreams gives me reason to suppose
that sleep produces any modifications other than secondary ones in the
state of things prevailing in the Ucs.” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
560
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
555
CARDINAL
).
35
CARDINAL
. “
Zur Wunscherfullung
PERSON
,”
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
555
CARDINAL
If.; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
550
CARDINAL
ff.
36
CARDINAL
. An entrepreneur, as
Freud
ORG
reminds us, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist, “and
the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is
invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of
the previous day
DATE
, a wish from the unconscious” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
566
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
561
CARDINAL
). On the notion of “indestructible” and “immortal,” cf.
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
559
CARDINAL
,
583
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
533
CARDINAL
,
577
CARDINAL
.
Thus the
first
ORDINAL
function of the topography is to give a schematic picture of the
descending degrees of desire all the way to the indestructible. Even at
this point, perhaps, we may say that the topography is the metaphorical
picture of the indestructible as such: “In the unconscious nothing can
be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.” This statement
foreshadows the formulations of
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
”: the unconscious is timeless. The topography is the locality which pictorially represents that “timelessness.”
But this pictorial representation is at the same time a snare—the snare of thingness. Hence, from the very
first
ORDINAL
presentation of the topography
Freud
ORG
is careful to soften the spatial aspect of his schema and to emphasize
its directional orientation. He makes this adjustment by turning to the
well-defined problem of regression. It will be remembered that
regression designates both the return of thought to pictorial
representation (formal regression) and the return of man to childhood
(temporal regression). To these
Freud
ORG
now adds a regression of another kind, topographical regression, viz.
the flow of an idea, which is barred from ending in motor activity, back
from the motor pole toward the perceptual pole and ending in
hallucination. This
third
ORDINAL
type of regression is therefore inseparable from the other
two
CARDINAL
modes of regression whose disclosure was possible only through dream
deciphering. The question is whether it adds something to the former
regressions or is merely their schematic representation.
In interpreting the famous dream about the dead child whose body is burning and who comes to awaken its father,
Freud
ORG
raises the question of the nature of the “psychical locality” of the
scene of action of dreams—a psychical rather than anatomical locality.
This notion of psychical locality is analogous from the outset: the
psychical apparatus functions like a compound microscope, or like a
photographic apparatus; the psychical locality is like the place in the
apparatus where the image is formed. This point is itself an
37.
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
583
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
577
CARDINAL
.
38
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
{die psychische
Lokalitdt
ORG
);
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
. It should be noted that the expression comes from
Fechner
ORG
’s
Elemente
GPE
der
Psychophysik
GPE
(
2
CARDINAL
,
520
CARDINAL
): “the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life” {
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
).
ideal point to which there corresponds no tangible component
of the apparatus. Thus the comparison leads to the paradox of a series
of localities that constitute not so much a real extension as a fixed
order:“Strictly speaking, there is no need for the hypothesis that the
psychical systems are actually arranged in a spatial order. It would be
sufficient if a fixed order [eine feste
Reihenfolge
ORG
] were established by the fact that in a given psychical process the
excitation passes through the systems in a particular temporal
sequence.” Properly speaking, therefore, spatiality is only an
“auxiliary representation”; it is meant to represent the mental
apparatus as composed of distinct systems which function in determined
directions.
At this point it should be remarked that the
execution of this program bears the imprint of an illusion we have thus
far left undiscussed.
Freud
ORG
is still under the influence of the theory of the child’s seduction by
an adult; this illusion is what nourishes the interpretation of
regression as an attraction exercised by memory traces which arise from
and lie close to perception. Thus the
two
CARDINAL
“ends” of the apparatus are defined as motility and perception. The
mnemic traces are placed “near” the perceptual end, the critical agency
“near” the motor end; the traces are close to perception just as the
preconscious is close to motor activity. Finally, the unconscious “lies
behind” the preconscious, in the sense that it has no access to
consciousness “except via the preconscious." The progressive direction
of the functioning of waking life lies toward motor activity, whereas
the regressive direction designates the movement by which “an idea
[Vorstellung] is turned back into the sensory image [Bild\ from which it
was originally derived.” What renders this topography obsolete is
doubtless the fact that the regressive pole is characterized as the
perceptual pole. This schema is closely linked with the hallucination
theory of wishes that was inherited from
the “Project” of 1895
ORG
and kept alive by the theory of
39
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
542
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
537
CARDINAL
.
40
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
543
CARDINAL
. In this retrogressive movement the direction of the cathexis arising
from the unconscious extends backward toward the memory traces of
perception in such a way as to make possible “the cathexis of the system
Pcpt
PERSON
. in the reverse direction, starting from thoughts [
Gedanken
ORG
], to the pitch of complete sensory vividness” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
543
CARDINAL
).
childhood seduction considered as a real memory. The decisive phenomenon, as
Freud
ORG
sees it, is not that the path toward motor activity is closed off, but
that the dream-thoughts, thus thrust back from consciousness, are
attracted by childhood memories which have retained a certain closeness
to perception by virtue of their sensory vividness: “On this view a
dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified
by being transferred onto a recent experience. The infantile scene is
unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with
returning as a dream.” <48> It is understandable that when
Freud
ORG
finally discovered his error, he thought for a moment the whole system was going to collapse. <
49>
TIME
<
48
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
552
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
546
CARDINAL
.
<
49
CARDINAL
>
One
CARDINAL
may follow the phases of this breakdown and also the resistance on the part of the hypothesis in
the “Letters to Fliess
PRODUCT
,” Origins, pp.
73
CARDINAL
,
12528
DATE
,
132
CARDINAL
,
163-65
DATE
,
183
CARDINAL
-85,
187
CARDINAL
(n.
1
CARDINAL
),
193
CARDINAL
,
196
CARDINAL
-98. And yet, even in
1895
DATE
Freud
PRODUCT
was speaking of the “things seen or heard and only half-understood” (ibid., p.
73
CARDINAL
).
Cf
PERSON
. also the allusion to sublimation, ibid., pp.
196
CARDINAL
-98. It was through his own self-analysis that
Freud
ORG
discovered that the infantile scene of seduction originated in fantasies (
Jones, Life and Work
ORG
,
1
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
;
Anzieu
ORG
, L’Auto-analyse, p.
61
CARDINAL
). At the same time his study of folklore and the history of
religions—especially those involved with cases of demoniacal possession
—confirmed him as to the unreality of the childhood scene (“
Letters to Fliess
WORK_OF_ART
,” Origins, pp.
187
CARDINAL
-90). Concerning fantasies, see ibid., p.
204
CARDINAL
. The question arises whether this is not the same tenacious illusion that will reappear in the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation of religion, where the attempt will be made, with a
great array of history and ethnology, to reconstruct a real murder of
the father of the horde, and then a real murder of
the Egyptian Moses
ORG
(cf. below,
Book II
EVENT
, Part II,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
3
CARDINAL
).
It would seem that this confusion of a fantasy scene with a perceptual one prevents the topography of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
from completely freeing itself from natural spatiality and from drawing
all the consequences implied in the idea of a “psychical locality.”
Thus, the topography wavers back and forth between representing a series
of places homologous to physical localities and representing a “scene
of action” that is in no way a part of the world but simply the
schematic picture of what has been described as “representability”
{Darstellbarkeit).
I do not think, however, that the objection
invalidates the essential elements of this topography; the theory of
real seduction explains only the ambiguities of the topography, not the
underlying
reason for positing it. We began to discover that
reason when we designated the locality of the unconscious as the symbol
of “timelessness.” The following episodes of the topography will allow
us to bring this characteristic into the open.
To account for the temporal aspects of regression
Freud
ORG
introduces time into the system in the form of a history of its functioning. “
Dreaming
WORK_OF_ART
,” he reminds us, “is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded.”
43
CARDINAL
Freud
ORG
appeals to this topographic-genetic reconstruction in order to
elucidate a puzzling characteristic of wishes, namely their drive toward
fulfillment. It is assumed that there was a primitive state of the
psychical apparatus—one recognizes the primary process of
the “Project
ORG
” here—in which the repetition of experiences of satisfaction created a solid link between the excitation and the mnemic image:
As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse [psychische
Regung
PERSON
] will at once emerge which will seek to re-cathect the mnemic image of
the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to
re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of
this kind is what we call a wish [Wunsch]; the reappearance of the
perception is the fulfillment of the wish [Wun-scherfiillung]; and the
shortest path to the fulfillment of the wish is a path leading direct
from the excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the
perception. Nothing prevents us from assuming that there was a primitive
state of the psychical apparatus in which this path was actually
traversed, that is, in ' which wishing ended in hallucinating. Thus the
aim of this
first
ORDINAL
psychical activity was to produce a “perceptual identity”—a repetition
of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.
<
50
CARDINAL
>
<
50
CARDINAL
> much for the shortest path of fulfillment. But the shortest path is
not the one reality has taught us; deception and failure have taught us
to halt the regression at the mnemic image and to invent the detour of
thinking (
Denken
PERSON
). From the genetic point of view,
this secondary system is the substitute (Ersatz) for
hallucinatory wishing. We now understand in what sense topographical
regression in dreams is also a temporal regression: that which animates
the regression is the longing for the primitive stage of hallucinatory
wishing; this return to the primary system is the key to pictorial
representation. <
51
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
51
CARDINAL
> “The theory governing all psychoneurotic symptoms culminates in a
single proposition, which asserts that they too are to be regarded as
fulfillments of unconscious wishes
” (
WORK_OF_ART
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
574
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
569
CARDINAL
). The reference to
Hughlings Jackson’s
PERSON
remark is not without interest: “Find out all about dreams and you will have found out all about insanity” (ibid., n.
2
CARDINAL
); what is inserted here into the purely topographical schema of the psychical apparatus is, in fact,
Jackson
PERSON
’s schema of functional liberation.
In the
third
ORDINAL
and last episode, under the heading “
The Primary and Secondary Processes
WORK_OF_ART
—Repression,”
The Interpretation of Dreams again revises the theory of the psychical apparatus
WORK_OF_ART
. Besides space and time, the apparatus now receives force and conflict.
This reworking of the apparatus is prescribed by the dream-work and
especially by the process of repression to which all the dream
mechanisms are related. The purely topographical point of view with
which we began was linked to the question of the origin of
dream-thoughts in the unconscious. It was natural therefore to represent
that origin as a locality and the regression toward perception as a
regression toward
one
CARDINAL
of the ends of the apparatus. What is important now are the relations
at the frontiers of the system; consequently the localities must be
replaced by “processes of excitation” and “modes of its discharge”:
“What we are doing here is once again to replace a topographical way of
representing things by a dynamic
one
CARDINAL
.” <
52
CARDINAL
> From the dynamic point of view, the primary process is directed
toward the free discharge of quantities of excitation, whereas the
secondary process aims at inhibiting this discharge and at transforming
the cathexis into a quiescent one (ruhende
Besetzung
PERSON
). This language is familiar to us from
the “Project
ORG
.” The problem, then, has to do with the “mechanical conditions” (mechanische
Verhaltnisse
PERSON
) of the discharge of excitation, according to whichever system is in control.
<
52
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
615
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
610
CARDINAL
.
What is the significance of this problem? The point at issue is the
fate of the regulation by the unpleasure principle and, ultimately, the fate of the constancy principle.
Freud
ORG
’s whole effort is aimed at establishing the secondary process within
the context of the regulation by unpleasure. To that end he reconstructs
repression on the model of flight provoked by an external danger and
regulated by the anticipation of pain; repression is a sort of
“avoidance [Abwen-dung] of the memory which is no more than a repetition
of the previous flight from the perception”; this affords us, says
Freud
ORG
, “the prototype and
first
ORDINAL
example of psychical repression.” 48 The avoidance of the memory image
may be interpreted economically as a regulation by the least expenditure
of unpleasure; the process that occurs under these conditions of
inhibition will be called the secondary process.
There is consequently nothing new here in comparison with
the “Project
ORG
.” On the contrary, the attentive reader will note that
the “Project”
EVENT
is ahead of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
in the description of the secondary process. Perhaps this retreat of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
in relation to
the “Project”
ORG
will give us the key to this topography and its consequences.
It is indeed striking that
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
is sparing in its explanation of the secondary process, as though the
functioning of the apparatus in the progressive direction did not
interest it. There are, to be sure, some scattered remarks about the
role of consciousness that confirm
the “Project
ORG
.” Here too consciousness is accessible both to peripheral excitations
and to pleasure-unpleasure; it is called “a sense-organ for the
perception of psychical qualities.” Here too the process of becoming
conscious depends on verbal images, the core of the preconscious.
Because of these images, the pleasure-unpleasure regulation develops
complications. The course of cathectic processes is no longer
automatically regulated by the unpleasure principle; consciousness is
now attracted by other signs besides those of pleasure-unpleasure. This
is possible because the system of linguistic symbols constitutes what
Freud
ORG
49
CARDINAL
. As the
Traumdeutung
PERSON
says: “Let us bear this firmly in mind, for it is the key to the whole theory of repression: the
second
ORDINAL
system can only cathect an idea if it is in a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it" (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
607
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
601
CARDINAL
).
calls a
second
ORDINAL
“sensory surface
” (Sinnesoberfliichen)
WORK_OF_ART
. Consciousness is now turned not only toward perception, but toward the pre-conscious thought processes as well.
One
CARDINAL
recognizes here the “Project’s”
two degrees
QUANTITY
of reality-testing. Oddly enough, however, that is not the aspect
The Interpretation of Dreams develops
WORK_OF_ART
; what is encountered on this progressive path is still another process
of the dream-work, one we have not yet spoken of and which
Freud
ORG
calls “secondary revision” (
Bearbeitung
PERSON
). This process consists, within the dream itself, in a
first
ORDINAL
interpretation, a rationalization, which gives dreams an affinity both to waking life and to daydreams.
The brevity of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
is still more noticeable in regard to the nature of the secondary
process. Thus the problem—of great importance in the “Project”—of the
relation between the inhibition exercised by the ego organization and
the discernment of perceived qualities is not developed: whence the
enigmatic character of the lines dealing with “thought-identity,” which
Freud
ORG
distinguishes from “perceptual identity” <53> and takes from the theory of judgment presented above. That is why
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
appears to come far less close than
the “Project”
EVENT
to what seemed to us the breaking point of the system, namely, the liberation from the pleasure principle. To be sure,
Freud
ORG
explicitly says that “thinking must aim at freeing itself more and more
from exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle and at
restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum
required for acting as a signal.” <
54>
TIME
And in enigmatic terms he describes this task of “consciousness” as a
“greater delicacy in functioning,” achieved by a “hypercathexis” (
Vberbeset
PERSON
-zung). <
55
CARDINAL
> Here
one
CARDINAL
recognizes the problem, raised in
the “Project
ORG
,” of the transition from observant thought to the cogitative process,
which operates not with indications of perceived reality but with
indications of thought-reality.
<
53
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
607
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
602
CARDINAL
.
<
54
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
608
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
602
CARDINAL
.
<
55
CARDINAL
> A few pages earlier
Freud
ORG
had written: “Under certain conditions a train of thought with a
purposive cathexis [zielbesetzte] is capable of attracting the attention
of consciousness to itself and in that event, through the agency of
consciousness, receives a ‘hypercathexis’ [Uberbesetzung]” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
599
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
594
CARDINAL
).
ORG
If
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
does not enter into the study of
the secondary process to the same extent as
the “Project
ORG
,” it is because its problem is entirely different.
The “Project”
ORG
aimed at being a complete psychology for the use of neurologists.
The Interpretation of Dreams
LAW
aims at accounting for the strange or bewildering (befremdendes)
phenomenon of dream-work. Why does the apparatus so often function in
the regressive rather than in the progressive direction? This problem is
faced by
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. Here the investigation of “thinking” is of less importance than the
“belated appearance” of the secondary process as compared with the
primary process, and the compelling force which the latter exercises on
the former. The primary process is truly primary: it is present “from
the
first
ORDINAL
”
{von Anfang
PERSON
an);53 the secondary process makes a belated appearance and is never definitively established.
Thus we see what
Chapter 7
LAW
is getting at; its true problem is the indestructibility of the primary
system. Because the pleasure-unpleasure principle is never completely
or definitively replaced, the principle of constancy remains our
ordinary truth. Consequently, what might have destroyed the system is
less important than what confirms it; and what confirms it is man’s
failure to escape from the pleasure-unpleasure principle; after all,
thinking only “aims at” freeing itself from that principle.
That
this is indeed the most basic intention of the “psychology” is confirmed
by the place given to repression in the final pages. The place is not
an indifferent one.
Freud
ORG
’s final analysis of repression comes immediately after his pessimistic remarks about the belated
54
CARDINAL
. “In consequence of the belated appearance [verspateten
Eintreffens
ORG
] of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses [
Wunschregungen
ORG
], remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the
preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for
all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses
that arise from the unconscious. These unconscious wishes exercise a
compelling force upon all later mental trends, a force which those
trends are obliged to fall in with or which they may perhaps endeavor to
divert and direct to higher aims. A further result of the belated
appearance [
Verspatutig
LOC
] of the secondary process is that a wide sphere of mnemic material is inaccessible to preconscious cathexis” (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
609
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
603-04
CARDINAL
).
appearance of the
secondary
ORDINAL
system as compared with the primary system: repression is the ordinary
operational mode of a psychism condemned to making a late appearance and
being prey to the infantile, the indestructible. The desires arising
from the invincible core of our being cannot be stopped on their path
toward unpleasure except by a conversion or transformation of affects,
an
Affekt
GPE
-verwandlung, which is the essence of repression. Of course, that which produces this transformation is the
secondary
ORDINAL
system, but not through access to what we just called “thinking”; the
secondary
ORDINAL
system is reduced here to operating from within pleasure-unpleasure by
the conversion of affects. As a result, the preconscious turns away from
its thoughts that have become unpleasant, and thus the principle of
pleasure-unpleasure is confirmed.
Freud
ORG
’s conclusion serves to confirm the earlier idea of the belated appearance of the
secondary
ORDINAL
system and the indestructible character of the primary system: “the presence [
Vorhandensein
PERSON
] of a store of infantile memories, which has from the
first
ORDINAL
been held back from the Pcs., becomes a sine qua non of repression.”
Thus
two
CARDINAL
aspects become intelligible now that we see them together, whereas when taken separately they had puzzled us. On the one hand,
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
seemed to us less advanced than
the “Project”
EVENT
with respect to going beyond the constancy and unpleasure principles;
but regression, of which dreams are the witness and model, precisely
attests to man’s inability to go beyond those principles. On the other
hand, the topography of
Chapter 7
LAW
seemed to us to waver between a realism of things and an auxiliary
representation of processes that require a different scene of action
than the space of nature.
Freud
ORG
’s illusion about the real memory of the infantile scene only partially
explains this wavering. In the last analysis, the spatiality of the
topography expresses man’s inability
56
CARDINAL
. “We here recognize the infantile stage of condemnation [Verurteilung],
that is, of rejection based on judgment [Verwerfung durch das
Urteilen
ORG
].’’ This part of the sentence appears neither in
GW
GPE
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
609
CARDINAL
, nor in SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
604
CARDINAL
, but is present in the
first
ORDINAL
German
NORP
editions, p.
446
CARDINAL
; the
French
NORP
translator, p.
492
CARDINAL
(
328
CARDINAL
) has preserved this very significant text. Concerning the rejection based on judgment, see the paper called “
Repression
WORK_OF_ART
”: “Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condemnation.”
57
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
610
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
604
CARDINAL
.
to go from slavery to freedom and happiness, or in terms less
Spino-zist
NORP
and more
Freudian
LANGUAGE
(though they are basically equivalent), from the regulation by the
pleasure-unpleasure principle to the reality principle. The “apparatus
” Chapter 7
LAW
focuses upon in its
three
CARDINAL
successive attempts is man insofar as he has been and remains a Thing.
Chapter 3
LAW
: Instinct and
Idea
PERSON
in
the “Papers on Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
was unsuccessful in harmonizing the theory inherited from
the “Project”
EVENT
with the conceptual structure elaborated by the actual work of interpretation. As a result,
Chapter 7
LAW
seems to remain somewhat external to the organic development of the
book. This structural discordance is a sign that the language of meaning
implied by the work of interpretation, and the quasi-physical language
implied by the language of the topography, are not yet perfectly
coordinated.
In
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
,” nearly all of which were written in
the early war years
DATE
, this problematic reaches its point of maturity and the
two
CARDINAL
requirements of analytic discourse attain an equilibrium. On the one
hand, these papers coherently thematize the topographic-economic point
of view in what is called the “
first
ORDINAL
topography”: unconscious-preconscious-conscious; on the other hand,
they show how the unconscious can be reintegrated into the realm of
meaning by a new interrelation—“within” the unconscious itself—between
instinct (
Trieb
PERSON
) and idea (
Vorstellung
PERSON
): an instinct can be represented (reprasentiert) in the unconscious only <56> by an idea (
Vorstellung
PERSON
). Our entire discussion will converge on this notion of
Vorstellungsreprdsentanz
GPE
or ideational representative; the interpretation of meaning through
meaning and the explanation by means of energies localized in systems
intersect and coincide in this notion. The
first
ORDINAL
movement, therefore, will be a movement back to instincts; the
second
ORDINAL
, a movement starting from the ideational representative of instincts. The question is whether
the “Papers on Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
are more successful than
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
in fusing the
two
CARDINAL
viewpoints of force and meaning.
<
56
CARDINAL
>
Five
CARDINAL
papers written in 1915—“Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes
ORG
,”
“Repression,” “
WORK_OF_ART
The Unconscious,” “
A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
,” and “Mourning and Melancholia”—are all that remain of a series of
twelve
CARDINAL
papers that
Freud
ORG
had originally planned to publish under the title Preliminaries to a Metapsychology (see SE,
14
DATE
,
105
CARDINAL
-07). The
five
CARDINAL
texts are presented in
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
, and in
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
. To them may be added “
A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
WORK_OF_ART
,
8
DATE
,
430
CARDINAL
-39; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
260
CARDINAL
-66;
Metapsychologie
ORG
, pp.
9-24
CARDINAL
; and especially the paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (
1914
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
138
CARDINAL
-70; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
73
CARDINAL
-102.
Thus we are going to follow
two
CARDINAL
paths. The
first
ORDINAL
will lead us back from the supposed self-evidence of consciousness to the origin of meaning in the positing of desire; in this
first
ORDINAL
movement we will attain both the topographic-economic point of view and
the concept of instinct (Trieb)—of which everything else is a
vicissitude (Schicksal).
But then we will have to take the reverse path; for instincts are like the
Kantian
NORP
thing—the transcendental = X; they too are never attained except in
that which stands for and represents them. In this way we will be led
from the problematic of instincts to the problematic of the
representatives of instincts.
2
CARDINAL
. The words
Vorstellung
PERSON
and
Reprasentanz
PERSON
pose serious problems for translators. How is one to translate the phrase, den Trieb reprdsentierende
Vorstellung
PERSON
? (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
264
CARDINAL
).
The Collected Papers
WORK_OF_ART
,
4
CARDINAL
,
98
DATE
, translates it as “the ideational presentation of an instinct,” and
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
166
CARDINAL
, as “the idea which represents an instinct.” Thus the
English
LANGUAGE
translators have abandoned the translation of
Vorstellung
PERSON
as “representation,” in spite of the solid tradition that goes back at least to
Kant
PERSON
and Schopenhauer; the words “idea” and “ideational” have serious reasons on their side in the tradition of
Locke and Hume
ORG
. In
French
NORP
,
Vorstellung
PERSON
can only be translated as representation. The difficulty is then to translate the term
Reprasentanz
PERSON
, which denotes the psychical expression or representative of an
instinct, in either the ideational or the affective order; I propose to
follow the suggestion of the translators of
the Collected Papers
ORG
and to translate
Reprasentanz
PERSON
as presentation. [Translator’s note: With the permission of the author, we shall here follow the
SE
PERSON
translation; thus
Vorstellung
PERSON
will be translated as “idea” and
Reprasentanz
PERSON
as “representative.”]
3
CARDINAL
. In
Chapter 2
LAW
of
the “Dialectic”
EVENT
we will return to this double movement in the framework of a philosophy of reflection. The
first
ORDINAL
movement is one of dispossession, whereby reflection completely separates itself from the illusion of consciousness; the
second
ORDINAL
movement is one of reappropriation, the re-
Will all
incoherence be eliminated? Will the gap between the discourse of energy
and the discourse of meaning be closed? This question will remain open
at the end of this chapter. But at least we will be able to understand
the reasons for this state of affairs.
THE ATTAINMENT OF THE
TOPOGRAPHIC
ORG
-ECONOMIC VIEW AND OF
THE CONCEPT OF INSTINCT
ORG
At the start of this investigation we take as our guide the paper of
1912
DATE
entitled “
A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
” <57><58> and the
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
sections of the celebrated paper of
1915
DATE
,
“The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
.”
capture of meaning through interpretation. In order to arrive
at the root of desire, reflection must let itself be dispossessed of the
conscious meaning of discourse and shifted off center to a different
locus of meaning; but as desire is accessible only in the disguises in
which it displaces itself, the emergence or positing of desire can be
incorporated into reflection only through the interpretation of the
signs of desire.
<
58
CARDINAL
>
First
ORDINAL
published in
English
LANGUAGE
in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
ORG
,
26
CARDINAL
(
1912
DATE
), Part
66
CARDINAL
; then in
German
NORP
in Int.
Z. Psycho
PERSON
-anal.,
1
CARDINAL
(
1913
DATE
).
One
CARDINAL
of the interesting points in these essays lies in what might be called a
Freudian
NORP
apologetics: the essays attempt to make the concept of the unconscious plausible, the
first
ORDINAL
for a nonspecialized public, the
second
ORDINAL
for a scientific public (both give up trying to convince philosophers
infected with the prejudice of consciousness!). More important, however,
is the fact that the topography is presented as resulting from a
reversal of viewpoint, from an antiphenomenology already put into effect
without having been reflected upon in the work of interpreting. We
proceed to thematize this reversal under
Freud
ORG
’s guidance.
The movement of thought leads from a descriptive
concept, where the term “unconscious” is still an adjective, to a
systematic concept, where it becomes a substantive; the loss of its
descriptive meaning is indicated by the abbreviation Ubw, which we
translate as
Ucs
GPE
. To arrive at the topographic point of view is to move from
the
adjectival unconscious to the substantival unconscious, from the
quality of being unconscious to the unconscious as a system. It is a
matter therefore of a reduction, of an epoche in reverse, since what is
initially best known, the conscious, is suspended and becomes the least
known. At the outset the quality of being unconscious is still
understood in relation to consciousness: it is simply the attribute of
what has disappeared but can reappear; the non-known is on the side of
the unconscious; the unconscious is something we assume and reconstruct
from signs derived from consciousness, since it is from consciousness
that memories disappear and in consciousness that they reappear.
Although we do not know how such unconscious representations can persist
in the state of unperceived existence, still it is in relation to
consciousness that we define this first concept of the unconscious as a
state of latency. <
59>
TIME
<
59
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
433
CARDINAL
,
10
CARDINAL
,
266
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
262
CARDINAL
,
14
DATE
,
167
CARDINAL
.
The shift from the descriptive to the systematic point of view
required by psychoanalysis is made as a result of the dynamic attributes
of the unconscious: the facts of posthypnotic suggestion, the terrible
power disclosed in hysterical phenomena, the psychopathology of everyday
life, etc., compel us to attribute an effective activity to certain
“strong unconscious ideas.” <
60
CARDINAL
> But the experience of psychoanalysis compels us to go further and to form the notion of “thoughts” (
Gedanken
ORG
) excluded from consciousness by forces that bar their reception. The reversal is motivated by this energy schema:
first
ORDINAL
there is the unconscious modality (henceforth
Freud
ORG
speaks of “unconscious psychical acts”); then the process of becoming
conscious is a possibility which may or may not eventuate. Consciousness
does not occur unconditionally and as a matter of course. The barrier
of resistance leads us to represent the process of becoming conscious as
a transgression, a crossing of a barrier; to become conscious is to
penetrate into, to be unconscious is to keep apart from consciousness.
<
61>
TIME
The topographical presentation is not far off; in effect, the activity of becoming conscious has in turn
two
CARDINAL
modalities; when it occurs without difficulty,
one
CARDINAL
will speak of the preconscious; when it is forbidden or “cut off,” one will speak of the unconscious. Thus we have
three
CARDINAL
“agencies”: Ucs., Pcs.,
Cs
PERSON
. The close connection between the energy point of view and the
topographic point of view is already visible: there are topographical
places because there are relations of exclusion that are relations of
force (resistance, defense, rejection). We have thus come back to the
level of
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. Indeed, dreams supply
Freud
ORG
with his ultimate proof of the unconscious: the dream-work, its
activity of transposition or distortion, makes us attribute to the
unconscious not only a distinct locality, but its own legality: “the
laws of unconscious activity differ widely from those of the conscious”;
in turn the discovery of unconscious processes and laws invites us to
form the idea of “belonging to a system,” which is the true
psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. This point of view is totally
unphenomenological. The enigmas of consciousness no longer serve as
signs of the unconscious; the unconscious is no longer defined as
“latency” as compared with a conscious “presence”; the fact of
“belonging to a system” allows the unconscious to be posited for itself.
<
60
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
434
CARDINAL
-35; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
.
<
61
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
434
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
.
The text entitled “The Unconscious” (“Das Unbewusste”) assumes
we have already attained the intermediate dynamic level; the
unconscious is the mode of being of that which, having been repressed,
has not been suppressed or annihilated. Hence to be excluded from
consciousness and to become conscious are
two
CARDINAL
correlative and contrary vicissitudes, which already enter into a
perspective that may be called topographical, since a barrier decides
the exclusion from or the access to consciousness: it is the barrier
that makes the topography. On this level the justification of the
unconscious takes on an aspect of scientific necessity: the text of
consciousness is a lacunary, truncated text; the assumption of the un-
9
CARDINAL
. “The system revealed by the sign that the single acts forming parts of
it are unconscious we designate by the name ‘The Unconscious,’ for want
of a better and less ambiguous term. In
German
NORP
, I propose to denote this system by the letters Ubw, an abbreviation of the
German
NORP
word ‘Unbewusst.’ And this is the
third
ORDINAL
and most significant sense which the term ‘unconscious’ has acquired in psychoanalysis” (.GW,
8
CARDINAL
,
439
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
266
CARDINAL
).
conscious is equivalent to a work of interpolation that
introduces meaning and connection into the text. Besides being
necessary, the hypothesis is also legitimate, for it does not differ
basically from the reconstruction we make of the consciousness of other
people by inference from their behavior, although in psychoanalysis it
is not a
second
ORDINAL
consciousness we infer but a psychism that lacks consciousness.
Accompanying this discussion is the idea that consciousness, far from
being the
first
ORDINAL
certitude, is a perception, and calls for a critique similar to
Kant
PERSON
’s critique of external perception. By calling consciousness a perception
Freud
ORG
makes it problematic, while at the same time preparing for its
subsequent treatment as a “surface” phenomenon. To be conscious and to
be unconscious are at most secondary characteristics: what alone count
are the relations of psychical acts to instincts and instinctual aims,
in accord with their interconnections and the particular psychical
system to which they belong.
As a matter of fact,
Freud
ORG
’s wish to abstract completely from the characteristics of conscious and unconscious will be realized only in the
second
ORDINAL
topography, which we shall speak of later. In spite of the ambiguity of
using the words “conscious” and “unconscious” sometimes in a
descriptive and sometimes in a systematic sense, these terms will be
retained in the
first
ORDINAL
topography to designate the systems themselves, the systematic sense being indicated by the abbreviations
Ucs
GPE
., Pcs.,
Cs
PERSON
. It is worth noting that
Freud
ORG
presents
only one
CARDINAL
remark to justify a vocabulary that continues to recall the attribute
of being conscious, namely, that the latter “forms the point of
departure for all our investigations.” We will come back to this
admission later.
At any rate consciousness has become the least
known, since to become conscious is to become an object of perception
under certain conditions. The question of consciousness has become the
question of becoming conscious, and the latter, in great part, coincides
with overcoming resistances.
In order to clarify this shift from a merely dynamic view to a
10
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
265
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
166
CARDINAL
-67.
11
DATE
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
271
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
172
CARDINAL
.
topographical view,
Freud
ORG
accepts the risks of an apparently absurd question: If to become
conscious is a “transposition” (Umsetzung) from the unconscious system
into the conscious system, are we to suppose that this transposition is
equivalent to a
second
ORDINAL
record (Niederschrift) in a new psychical locality (in einer neuen psy-chischen
Lokalitat
GPE
) , <
62
CARDINAL
> or is it a matter of a change of state involving the same material
and occurring in the same locality? An abstruse question, as
Freud
ORG
admits, but it must be raised if we are to take the topographical point of view seriously. <
63
CARDINAL
> The question is serious only if one does not confuse this psychical locality (
Lokalitat
GPE
) with anatomical localities (Ortlichkeiten). <
64
CARDINAL
> And
Freud
ORG
proposes, at least provisionally, to assume the naive and crude
hypothesis of the transition from one location to another and a double
registration of the same idea in
two
CARDINAL
different places. Why this absurdity? It should be noted that
Freud
ORG
appeals here to psychoanalytic practice, as if the most naive and
crudely naturalistic explanation were more faithful to what actually
takes place in interpretation. If, says
Freud
ORG
,
one
CARDINAL
communicates (mitteilt) to a patient the meaning of his trouble by telling him the idea which he has at
one
CARDINAL
time repressed, the patient is neither relieved nor cured, for he
remains separated from this idea by his resistances, which only make him
reject it again. Thus the idea is recorded both in the conscious region
of auditory memories and in the unconscious, where it remains enclosed
as long as the resistances are not overcome. The “double registration”
is therefore the provisional way of noting the difference in status of
the same idea, at the surface of the conscious and in the depths of the
repressed. We shall later see how and why this theory of double
registration may be transcended.
<
62
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
273
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
174
CARDINAL
. This could also be translated as a
second
ORDINAL
“registration.”
<
63
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
64
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
273
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
175
CARDINAL
.
We have just shown the reason for the shift from a merely
descriptive concept of latency to a systematic concept of a
topographical system; we must now bring this reversal of viewpoint
about. Whereas the
Husserlian
NORP
epoche was a reduction to consciousness, the
Freudian
NORP
epoche is seen as a reduction of consciousness; thus we speak of it as
an epoche in reverse. This reversal is achieved only when we posit
instinct (
Trieb
PERSON
) as the fundamental concept (Grundbegriff), with everything else being
understood as a vicissitude (Schicksal) of instincts. I will attempt to
make this substitution understandable by continuing to sift out the
antiphenomeno-logical characteristics of
Freud
ORG
’s approach. The epoche in reverse implies that we stop taking the
“object” as our guide, in the sense of the vis-a-vis of consciousness,
and substitute for it the “aims” of the instincts; and that we stop
taking the “subject” as our pole of reference, in the sense of the one
to whom or for whom “objects” appear. In short, we must abandon the
subject-object problematic as being that of consciousness.
Freud
ORG
abandons the “object” as psychological guide in the paper entitled “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes
ORG
,” which thematizes the earlier findings of
the Three Essays on Sexuality
ORG
.
In positing instinct as the basic concept whose function, as in
the experimental sciences, is to systematically relate empirical facts,
Freud
ORG
is aware that he has left the field of description for that of systematization.
Implied
ORG
in this systematization are not only conventions (definitions of
stimulus, need, and satisfaction) but also hypotheses or postulates (
Voraussetzungen
ORG
), the most important of which is the familiar hypothesis of constancy, which states that
the
25
PRODUCT
. This is only a
first
ORDINAL
approximation of the distinction between the epoche of consciousness, which is characteristic of
Freudian
NORP
psychoanalysis, and the
Husserlian
NORP
epoche; we will develop this confrontation at much greater length in
the “Dialectic,” Ch
ORG
.
1
CARDINAL
, where a more precise distinction will be made.
16
CARDINAL
. I purposely allude to the expressions “object-guide” and
“subject-pole,” which recall the vocabulary of phenomenology. But the
phenomenology that is thus destroyed is only a phenomenology of
consciousness; we must lose the object as the vis-a-vis of consciousness
and the subject itself as consciousness in order to recapture the
object as the transcendental guide and the subject as the reflective and
meditating I. We will elaborate this theme systematically in
the “Dialectic,” Ch
ORG
.
2
CARDINAL
.
17
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
took this occasion to write one of his most important texts on methodology:
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
210
CARDINAL
-11; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
117
CARDINAL
-18; the relations that definitions, basic concepts, and conventions
have to empirical matter in psychology are established on the pattern of
the experimental sciences of nature; cf. below, “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
1
CARDINAL
.
psychical apparatus “is automatically regulated by feelings
belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series.” This hypothesis in turn
assumes a correspondence between the qualities of pleasure-unpleasure
and “the amounts of stimulus [
Reizgrossen
ORG
] affecting mental life.” Thus we are back on the familiar ground of the
quantitative theory—in fact we have never left it since
the “Project
ORG
.”
With the concept of instinct we force the topography into an
economics: “Every instinct is a piece of activity.” But the economic
point of view finds its primary expression in the fact that the concept
of aim has primacy over the concept of object: “The aim of an instinct
is in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by
removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct.” From
now on the object is defined in function of the aim, and not conversely:
The
object of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which
the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable
about an instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes
assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make
satisfaction possible.
As such, it may either be an extraneous object (
Gegenstand
ORG
) or a part of
one
CARDINAL
’s own body. This dialectic of aim and object was discovered and elucidated by
Freud
ORG
in
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
.
Starting from the new problematic of aim and object there are “vicissitudes of instincts.” Since the study of the sources (
Quelle
ORG
) of instincts comes under the jurisdiction of biology, instincts are
known to us only in their aims: these alone lie within the scope of
psychology. This is another way of saying that the apparatus we are
20
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
214
CARDINAL
(jeder Trieb ist ein
Stuck Aktivitat
PERSON
);
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
122
CARDINAL
.
21
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
22
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
23
CARDINAL
. “Let us call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the
sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual
aim" (
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
34
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
, 135—36). The distinction between deviations “in respect of the object”
and deviations “in respect of the aim” is the governing factor in the
first
ORDINAL
essay.
considering is a psychical apparatus and that the
regulation by pleasure-unpleasure belongs to an order which, though
quantitative, is psychological.
In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”
Freud
ORG
presents a systematic but deliberately limited view of these
“vicissitudes.” Another hypothesis must be made: the distinction between
ego, or selfpreservative instincts, and sexual instincts. But this
hypothesis is not on the same plane as the hypothesis of constancy: the
latter is a general hypothesis, whereas the distinction between the
two
CARDINAL
kinds of instincts is only a working hypothesis that will undergo
subsequent alteration; it corresponds roughly to the biological
distinction between soma and germ-plasm and is seen to be a useful
instrument for psychoanalytic practice, since it was in the course of
clinical observations that sexual instincts came to be isolated from the
others. The primacy of the aim over the object is most clearly seen in
the sexual instincts:
Freud
ORG
says they “act vicariously [vikariierende] for one another” inasmuch as they can readily change their objects.
Although it is limited to the sexual instincts, the list of the instinctual vicissitudes may be regarded as systematic. Whereas
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
dealt only with repression, this vicissitude is now inserted among
three
CARDINAL
others: reversal (
Verkehrung
PERSON
) of an instinct into its opposite, turning round (
Wendung
GPE
) upon the subject’s own self, and sublimation. (The essay does not
treat of sublimation but deals only with reversal and turning round; a
separate paper is devoted to repression.)
It is to be noted that
it is not in terms of the intended object that reversal or turning round
can be understood; on the contrary, the intended object will itself be
reinterpreted in economic terms. In the reversal from the active to the
passive role in the paired opposites voyeurism-exhibitionism, the aim is
what changes; in the reversal from an external content to the content
of
one
CARDINAL
’s self (inhaltliche
Verkehrung
PERSON
)
25
CARDINAL
in the pair sadism-masochism, the object is what
25
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
219
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
. The text dates from a period when
Freud
ORG
had not yet recognized the idea of primary masochism; cf. “
The Economic Problem of Masochism
WORK_OF_ART
” (
1924
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
371
CARDINAL
-83; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
-70. We shall return to this notion later,
Book II
ORG
, Part III,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
1
CARDINAL
.
changes, but in relation to an unchanged aim—the causing of
pain. But the “reversal” may also be stated in terms of “turning round,”
for masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the subject’s own
ego, and exhibitionism includes looking at
one
CARDINAL
’s own body. We are not interested here in a detailed study of these
diverse vicissitudes, but rather in their underlying structural
principle. In this regard the chief thing to notice is that the notion
of object is recast in accordance with the economic distribution of
libido.
But this economic recasting of the notion of the object
entails that of the subject. The exchange of roles between the self and
another, both in the pair sadism-masochism and in the pair
voyeurism-exhibitionism, forces us to question collectively all the
so-called selfevidences concerning the relation between a subject-pole
and its objective counterpart. The subject-object distribution is itself
an economic distribution. That is why
Freud
ORG
does not hesitate, in the case of the transformation of sadism into
masochism, to speak of a return to “the narcissistic object” as the
counterpart of the exchange of subjects. To talk of a narcissistic
object, in reference to primary narcissism and to any return to
narcissism, is simply to apply the definition of the object as the means
of attaining instinctual aims. Thus narcissism is set within a vast
economics in which not only objects but also the respective positions of
subject and object are exchanged for one another. Not only are this and
that object interchanged, while subserving the same aims, but also the
self and the other, in the reversal from active to passive role, from
looking at to being looked at, from inflicting pain on another to
inflicting pain on oneself. In relation to these transformations, to
these economic exchanges, narcissism serves as a primordial landmark: it
represents the primal confusion between thing-love and self-love. To
denote this lack of distinction
Freud
ORG
speaks equivalently of the narcissistic object or the cathected ego.
This structure of interchange enabled
Freud
ORG
to adopt an expression from
Ferenczi
GPE
that was destined to great success—and also to great abuses—the term
“introjection,” as opposed to projection. If one admits a narcissistic
phase in which the external world is indifferent and the subject the
sole source of pleasure, then the process of
distinguishing between the external and the internal, between
the world and the ego, is a process of economic division between what
the ego can incorporate into itself and prize as the possession of the
“pleasure-ego” (Lust-1 ch) and what it rejects as hostile, as the source
of unpleasure. This division of internal and external according to the
attitude of love (if by love is understood the ego’s relation to its
sources of pleasure) is further complicated by a different process of
division according to the attitude of hate.
Love
WORK_OF_ART
has, indeed, a “
second
ORDINAL
opposite,” namely hating: the opposite of the loved object for the
pleasure-ego is unpleasure; the opposite of the loved object for the
instincts of self-preservation is the hated object. What we ordinarily
call the object—the loved or the hated object— is not something
immediately given; it is rather the end result of a double series of
divisions between the internal and the external; to distinguish this end
result from the initial narcissistic stage, we speak of it as the
object-stage.
It could be said that what is economically
reconstructed at the end of this process is precisely “the object” in
the phenomenological sense. At the end of the paper “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes” Freud comes back to ordinary language: we speak of the
attraction of an object, and say that we love that object; we say that
it is we—the total ego—who love, but not that an instinct hates or
loves. Linguistic usage, in which the verbs “to love” and “to hate” are
governed by the object, is justified only at the end of a genesis of the
object function, at that period of desire when love and hate have
constituted, so to speak, their opposed objects and constituted their
subject. The history of the object is the history of the object
function, and this history is the history of desire itself. What
interests us here is not this history—the famous theory of stages— but
its methodological import; the object, in
Freud
ORG
, is not something immediately presented to an ego endowed with immediate awareness; it is a variable in an economic function.
The economic interchange between the ego and objects must be
29
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
229
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
137
CARDINAL
.
30
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
presents an overall view of these phases in the New Introductory Lectures,
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
98—102
CARDINAL
.
carried to the point where not only is the object a function
of the aim of an instinct, but the ego itself is an aim of instinct.
This is the meaning of the introduction of narcissism into
psychoanalysis. Of course, we never know primary narcissism face to
face. Consequently, in his paper “
On Narcissism: An Introduction
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Freud
ORG
proceeds by a number of converging signs: narcissism as perversion, in
which one’s own body is treated as an object of love; narcissism as the
libidinal complement to the instincts of self-preservation; the
schizophrenic’s indifference to reality, as if he had withdrawn his
libido from objects, without replacing them by others in fantasy; and
the overestimation of the power of thought on the part of primitive
peoples and children. Then there is the withdrawal into oneself of the
sick person and the hypochondriac; and finally, there is the egoism of
sleep. In all these cases we know directly only processes of the
withdrawal of cathexis; but in conceiving these withdrawals as the
return to primary narcissism (i.e. as secondary narcissism) we introduce
into the theory a new intelligibility that crowns the attainment of the
topographic-economic point of view. The introduction of narcissism
deepens our notion of instinct; it forces us to conceive of instincts as
more radical than any subject-object relation. Instincts are the
reservoir of energy underlying all the distributions of energy between
the ego and objects. Object-choice itself becomes a concept correlative
to narcissism, as a departure from narcissism; from this point of view
there are only departures from
—and
ORG
returns to—narcissism.
At the proper place in our discussion we
will see an important application of this theory of narcissism in the
theory of identification and sublimation. In this respect, the article
on narcissism makes a surprising advance over the writings of the
1920-24
DATE
period and foreshadows the reorganization of the topography according
to the new sequence of ego, id, and superego. In effect, after consider-
31
DATE
. “
Zur Einfiihrimg des
PERSON
Narzissmus
ORG
,”
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
138
CARDINAL
-70; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
73-102
CARDINAL
;
Collected Papers
ORG
,
4
CARDINAL
,
30-59
DATE
. For a philosophy of reflection, the introduction of narcissism will be
the supreme test: it will be necessary to give up the subject of
immediate apperception; an abortive
Cogito
PERSON
has taken the place of the
first
ORDINAL
truth / think, I am. With the extreme point in the reduction of all phenomenology, the extreme point in the crisis of the
Cogito
PERSON
is also reached.
Cf
PERSON
. below, “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
2
CARDINAL
.
ing several other applications (the mechanism of paraphrenia,
narcissistic object-choice, overvaluation of the sexual object,
femininity)
Freud
ORG
introduces the important idea that the formation of ideals is brought
about through a displacement of narcissism. We are not yet in a position
to develop all the consequences of this important discovery, but at
least we learn that the ideal by which the subject measures his actual
ego can be brought under the libido theory, precisely through the
mediation of narcissism. This connection between ideals and narcissism
is extremely suggestive: thanks to the complicity between what seems to
us the height of egoism and the worship of an ideal before which the ego
effaces itself, ideals themselves are to be accounted for in terms of
the displacement of instincts. This will be the focal point of the
second
ORDINAL
part of our “
Analytic
WORK_OF_ART
.”
For the present, however, we are in a position to integrate into our reflection another term that
Freud
ORG
mentions in this context of the relations between idealization and
narcissism; this other factor is sublimation, which “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes” mentioned as being the
fourth
ORDINAL
vicissitude of an instinct. In the paper on narcissism
Freud
ORG
says:
Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and
consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than,
and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent
falls upon deflection from sexuality.
Idealization
ORG
is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any
alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s
mind.
Idealization
ORG
is possible in the sphere of ego-libido as well
32
CARDINAL
. “This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed
in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its
appearance displaced onto this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile
ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As
always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself
incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not
willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when,
as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the
awakening of his own critical judgment, so that he can no longer retain
that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego
ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for
the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
).
as in that of object-libido. For example, the sexual
overvaluation of an object is an idealization of it. Insofar as
sublimation describes something that has to do with the instinct and
idealization something to do with the object, the
two
CARDINAL
concepts are to be distinguished from each other.
That is
one
CARDINAL
reason for distinguishing between idealization and sublimation. But
even more important is the fact that one can submit himself to an ideal
without succeeding in sublimating his libidinal instincts; the neurotic
is precisely the victim of the heightened demands imposed upon his
instincts by the formation of an ego ideal, demands accompanied by a low
potential of sublimation. To be successful, of course, idealization
requires sublimation; but it does not always obtain it, for it cannot
enforce it. We touch here on something very important: there exists a
shortcut, a way of violence in the formation of ideals, which we will
not understand until we have introduced masochism as another primary
phenomenon; by contrast, sublimation would be a kind of gentle
conversion. If we understood this, we would see that sublimation is
quite a different vicissitude from repression: “sublimation is a way
out, a way by which the claims of the ego can be met without involving
repression.”
All this will only become meaningful, however, in the transition from the
first
ORDINAL
to the
second
ORDINAL
topography and through the introduction—already proposed in the paper
“On Narcissism”—of “a special psychical agency.” This will be the
superego. We must say even more: with the question of the superego,
there arises the question of the ego, and this question no longer
coincides exactly with that of consciousness, which alone was thematized
in a topography whose primary concern was to free the positing of the
unconscious from dependency on the evidence of consciousness.
Without anticipating too much of the
second
ORDINAL
topography and the new problems it raises, we can take the
investigation of the relations between narcissism and object-libido a
bit further by mentioning as a final example—perhaps the most striking
one
CARDINAL
of all—
the
PRODUCT
33
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
34
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94-95
DATE
.
35
CARDINAL
. '
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
162
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
95
CARDINAL
.
work of mourning, to which
Freud
ORG
devotes
one
CARDINAL
of his admirable short essays, “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
.” Mourning is a work: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss
of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken
the place of one, such as
one
CARDINAL
’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” The absorbing work of
mourning, the exclusive devotion to this work, certain traits of which
are well known—the loss of interest in the outside world, the turning
away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of the lost
object—raises a tremendous problem, nothing less than the problem of the
economics of pain (Schmerz) (pain here being quite dilferent from the
unpleasure of the pair
Lust-Unlust
PRODUCT
). This economics of pain leads us to the heart of the relations between
narcissism and object-libido. Realitytesting having shown that the
loved object no longer exists, the libido is called upon to withdraw
from its attachments to this object; the libido rebels; and it is only
bit by bit and with a great expenditure of cathectic energy that the
libido carries out piecemeal, and upon each of the memories of the lost
object, the orders given by reality. This work is what absorbs the ego
and inhibits it; when it is completed the ego once again becomes free
and uninhibited.
Melancholia
PERSON
, on the other hand, adds to those traits a decisive element: a diminution of
one
CARDINAL
’s self-regard (Selbstgefiihl), To this lowering of self-esteem is
joined a heightened self-criticism, which once more brings us to the
threshold of the problematic of the superego; that critical and watchful
agency (lnstanz) is, in effect, the basis of moral conscience (
Gewissen
PERSON
). We are interested here not in the structure of that agency, but in
the fact that in the melancholic’s self-reproaches the ego has been
substituted for the loved object against whom the reproaches had
originally been directed (
Ihre Klagen
PERSON
sind
Anklagen
ORG
). What has happened is this:
36
CARDINAL
. “
Trailer
ORG
und
Melancholia
GPE
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
428
CARDINAL
-46; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
243
CARDINAL
-
58
DATE
.
38
CARDINAL
. This expression is also found in “On Narcissism,” in the context of the discussion of
Adler
GPE
’s theories.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
166
CARDINAL
-70; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
98-102
CARDINAL
.
39
CARDINAL
. “What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly
called ‘conscience’; we shall count it, along with the censorship of
consciousness and reality-testing, among the major institutions of the
ego, and we shall come upon evidence to show that it can become diseased
on its own account” (
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
433
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
247
CARDINAL
).
instead of being displaced onto another object, the libido
was withdrawn into the ego and employed in establishing an
identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the ego
receives the blows intended for the object. In this way an object-loss
becomes an ego-loss and the ego is mistreated.
We have thus brought to light a new process, which
Freud
ORG
calls narcissistic identification with the object, that is to say, the substitution of identification for object-love. <
65
CARDINAL
>
Identification
NORP
as such will raise serious problems later on; here it serves as a sign
that helps us discover a more hidden relation between object-choice and
narcissism. For this process to be possible, it is necessary (
1
CARDINAL
) that object-choice can regress, given certain conditions, to original
narcissism; this seems to imply that the object-choice was made on a
narcissistic basis; this regression is what is lacking in mourning. (
2
CARDINAL
) It is also necessary that the love relationships were highly
ambivalent, in order that the element of hate, set free by the loss of
the loved object, may take refuge in narcissistic identification and
thereby turn round upon the subject in the form of self-reproaches;
hence there is a
second
ORDINAL
regression, a return to the stage of sadism, which will also be of
great significance for the mechanism of conscience, remorse, and
self-punishment.
<
65
CARDINAL
> In this text
Freud
ORG
suggests a possible connection between object-choice and
identification: the two would come together in the oral stage, where to
love is to devour (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
436
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
249
CARDINAL
-50). The regression from object-choice to the narcissistic stage would
thus include the regression to the oral phase of the libido; this would
mean that the oral phase itself still belongs to narcissism. It should
be noted at this point that
Freud
ORG
was never overconfident in his explanations of identification;
identification is truly the thorn in the side of psychoanalysis. It is
no mere accident that
Freud
ORG
Admits
three
CARDINAL
times that the economics of mourning eludes him.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
430
CARDINAL
,
439
CARDINAL
,
442
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
245
CARDINAL
,
252
CARDINAL
,
255
CARDINAL
.
One might expect that mourning, precisely because it is not
melancholia, does not present this group of relations to narcissism. But
such is not the case. Coming back to mourning, after the discussion of
melancholia,
Freud
ORG
remarks,
Each
PRODUCT
single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which
demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the
verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego,
confronted as it were with the question whether it shall share this
fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it
derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has
been abolished.
A cruel but penetrating remark: the work of
mourning is undertaken in order to survive the loss of the object;
detachment from the object is dictated by self-attachment. But that is
not, perhaps, the sole function of narcissism in the work of mourning.
An earlier remark has gone unnoticed: the orders given by reality,
Freud
ORG
says, are carried out only bit by bit, with a great expenditure of time
and cathectic energy; and he adds: “and in the meantime the existence
of the lost object is psychically prolonged.” This process of
internalizing, of installing the lost object within ourselves, once
again links mourning with melancholia, and thus the connection of
mourning with narcissism is seen to be less shocking. Narcissism no
longer pursues the every-man-for-himself attitude of the survivor, but
the survival of the other in the ego; and so we can say with
Freud
ORG
: “by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.” Further, the
obsessional self-reproaches arising after a death has occurred show that
mourning too, in some degree, presents aspects of ambivalence between
love and hate; whence the regression of this ambivalent libido back into
the ego in the form of selfreproaches. At the end of the essay the
regression of the libido to narcissism stands as the fundamental
precondition of both mourning and melancholia.
Here let us bring
to a close the investigation of the relations and exchanges between
object-libido and ego-libido. The point we have been trying to make is
simply that the ego of psychoanalysis is not what presents itself as
subject at the outset of a description of consciousness; the notion of
“ego-instinct” (Ichtrieb), symmetric with that of “object-instinct”
(Objekttrieb), makes instinct a structure prior to the phenomenal
relation of subject-object. The notion of instinct is seen, then, to be
the quid aimed at in every endeavor to
42
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
430
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
245
CARDINAL
.
43
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
445
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
257
CARDINAL
.
work back from the symptom of “being conscious.” In effect,
instincts have been freed, not only from reference to objects, but from
reference to the subject, since the “ego” has itself gone over to the
side of objects. In the notion of
Ichtrieb
PRODUCT
, the
Ich
PERSON
is related to instincts no longer as subject but as object, in the
sense, as we have said, of being the variable function of an aim; the
ego’s position with respect to instincts is now such that the ego can be
exchanged with objects by means of substitution or displacement of
cathexis. To switch to another terminology, which is called for here
because of the quarrel with
Adler
GPE
, the self (
Selbst
PERSON
) and self-regard (
Selbst
PERSON
-gefiihl) (the feeling of inferiority, etc.) by no means escape the
economy of the libido; self-regard comes within a generalized erotics
(Erolik) by means of the great redistributions of erotic cathexes.
In
order to understand the topography one must, I think, keep clearly in
mind the double destruction—of the intended object as supposed guide,
and of the subject as supposed pole of reference for all the intentions
of consciousness. One might say that the topography is the
nonanatomical, psychical locality introduced into psychoanalytic theory
as the condition of the possibility of all the vicissitudes of
instincts; it is the marketplace of cathexes where ego-instincts and
object-instincts are exchanged for one another.
At the end of
this epoche in reverse, consciousness is now the least known; it has
ceased to be self-evident and has become a problem. This problem, dealt
with in the topography, has to do with the process of becoming
conscious.
Such is, it seems to me, the meaning of the difficult
fifth
ORDINAL
section of “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
,” entitled “
The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs
WORK_OF_ART
.” whose examination we postponed.
Freud
ORG
presents this section as a description, but its meaning is actually
opposed to any description; it is rather the transcription in
descriptive, quasi-phenomenological terms of the result of the
antiphenomenology. That is why I present it here as a result and not as a
given: “The distinction we have made between the
two
CARDINAL
psychical systems receives fresh significance when we observe that processes in the
one
CARDINAL
44. n Narcissism,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
167
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
99
DATE
.
system, the
Ucs
GPE
., show characteristics which are not met with again in the system
immediately above it.” We shall likewise use pseudo-descriptive terms
when we say: the unconscious is timeless; the unconscious is exempt from
contradiction; the unconscious follows the pleasure principle and not
the reality principle, etc. But these characteristics are in no way
descriptive, for “the attribute of being conscious [Bewusstheit], which
is the only characteristic of psychical processes that is directly
presented to us, is in no way suited to serve as a criterion for the
differentiation of systems.” And further on: “Consciousness stands in no
simple relation either to the different systems or to repression.”
Whence the conclusion: “The more we seek to win our way to a
metapsychological view of mental life, the more we must learn to
emancipate ourselves from the importance of the symptom of ‘being
conscious’
GPE
[Bewusstheit]." In the topography what we transcribe is precisely this emancipation.
REPRESENTATIVES AND IDEAS
We
must now go back along the reverse path. From the opening pages of the
essay “The Unconscious” the question is asked, How do we arrive at a
knowledge of the unconscious? And the answer: “It is of course only as
something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone
transformation [Umsetzung] or translation [
Obersetzung
GPE
] into something conscious.” And
Freud
ORG
adds: “Psychoanalytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible.”
What
does such a possibility consist in? Here is where we enter into the
most difficult problematic—the one indicated by the title of this
chapter: “Instinct and
Idea
PERSON
.” At a certain point the question of force and the question of meaning
coincide; that point is where instincts are indicated, are made
manifest, are given in a psychical
45
DATE
.
GW
ORG
.
10
CARDINAL
,
285
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
186
CARDINAL
.
48
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
193
CARDINAL
.
49
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
264
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
166
CARDINAL
.
50
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
representative, that is, in something psychical that
“stands for” them; all the derivatives in consciousness are merely
transformations of this psychical representative, of this primal
“standing for.” To designate this point,
Freud
ORG
coined the excellent expression
Re-prasentanz
LOC
. Instincts, which are energy, are “represented” by something psychical.
But we must not speak of representation in the sense of
Vorstellung
PERSON
, i.e. an “idea” of something, for an idea is itself a derived form of
this “representative” which, before representing things—the world,
one
CARDINAL
’s own body, the unreal—stands for instincts as such, presents them
purely and simply. This function of presentation, or representation, is
evoked not only on the
first
ORDINAL
page but in the
first
ORDINAL
sentence of “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
”: “We have learnt from psychoanalysis that the essence of the process
of repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea
which represents an instinct [den Trieb reprdsentierende
Vorstellung
PERSON
], but in preventing it from becoming conscious.” <
66
CARDINAL
>
PERSON
<
66
CARDINAL
> ibid.
What is the nature of this function of presentation or
representation that governs not only ideas but, as we shall see,
affects as well?
If the problem we enter upon here is not basically a new one, <67><68> it is new in terms of
Freud
ORG
’s position.
Freud
ORG
’s originality consists in shifting the point of coincidence of meaning
and force back to the unconscious itself. He presupposes this
coincidence as making possible all the “transformations” and
“translations” of the unconscious into the conscious. In spite of the
barrier that separates the systems, they must be assumed to have a
common structure whereby the conscious and the unconscious are equally
psychical. That common structure is precisely the function of
Reprasentanz
ORG
. This function is what lets us “interpolate” unconscious acts into the text of conscious acts; it assures a close “contact” (
Beriihrung
NORP
) between conscious and unconscious psychical processes and makes it
possible that the latter, “with the help of a certain amount of work . .
. can be transformed [umsetzen] into, or replaced
<
67
CARDINAL
> In our discussion of this
Freudian
NORP
concept in
Chapter 2
LAW
of the “
Dialectic
NORP
” we shall see its relationship to similar concepts in
Spinoza
GPE
and
Leibniz
PERSON
.
<
68>
TIME
/GW,
10
CARDINAL
,
267
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
168
CARDINAL
.
[ersetzen] by, conscious mental processes”; finally, because
of it “all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental
acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to
them. Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that
the only respect in which they differ from conscious ones is precisely
in the absence of consciousness [Wegfall des Bewusst-seins].”
This function of
Reprasentanz
ORG
is certainly a postulate.
Freud
ORG
gives no proof for it; he assumes it as that which allows him to
transcribe the unconscious into the conscious and to group the
two
CARDINAL
together as comparable psychical modalities; that is why he writes this
function into the definition of instinct itself. He will
one day
DATE
say, “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology.” We do
not in fact know what instincts are in their own dynamism. We do not
talk of instincts in themselves; we talk of instincts in their psychical
representatives; and by the same token we speak of them as a psychical
and not as a biological reality. True, we were able to call them “a form
of activity,” thereby designating them as energy, drive, tension, etc.
But the psychological qualification of that energy is a part of its
definition, for it is an energy that is not represented by, but
representative of, organic energies: “If now we apply ourselves to
considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’
appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the
somatic, as the psychical representative [Reprdsen-tant] of the stimuli
originating from within the organism and reaching the mind”; and to
emphasize the composite character of this concept,
Freud
ORG
connects with it the notion of work, in which we have recognized a
privileged expression of the composite language required by
psychoanalysis: an instinct is “a measure of the demand made upon the
mind for work [ein Mass der
Arbeitsan-forderung
PERSON
] in consequence of its connection with the body.”
54
DATE
. Ibid.
55
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
56
CARDINAL
. New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
GPE
,
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
95
CARDINAL
.
57
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
214
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
121
CARDINAL
-22. In the ensuing terminological discussion
Freud
ORG
again refers to the representative or presentative function in
connection with each of the interrelated terms. “By the pressure [
Drang
GPE
] of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure
Hence,
we cannot say simply that instincts are expressed by ideas— this is
only one of the derived aspects of the representative function of
instincts. More radically it must be said that instincts themselves
represent or express the body to the mind (in die
Seele
ORG
). This is, perhaps, the most fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis, the
one
CARDINAL
that qualifies it as psychoanalysis. Let us examine this hypothesis in its important consequences.
All
the vicissitudes of instincts are vicissitudes of the “psychical
representatives” of instincts. This is evident in the instances of
“reversal” and “turning round,” which alone are treated in detail in the
paper “Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes
ORG
.” The reversal from looking at to being looked at and from inflicting
pain on another to inflicting pain on oneself finds expression in ideas
and affects that represent displacements of energy in a psychical field
where they can be signified and recognized, and thus become, with the
help of a certain amount of work, conscious.
The vicissitude of
the “psychical representatives” is far more instructive in the case of
repression, which constitutes, it will be remembered, the
third
ORDINAL
vicissitude of an instinct. Repression brings to the psychical representative of an instinct all the complexity that
Freud
ORG
designates by the words “remoteness” (
Entfernung
PERSON
) and
of the demand for work which it represents [reprdsentiert]” (ibid.). “By the source [
Quelle
ORG
] of an instinct is meant the somatic process which occurs in an organ
or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented [reprdsentiert] in
mental life by an instinct” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
215
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
123
CARDINAL
). These passages clearly reflect the basic ambiguity in the concept of
an instinct: in some texts an instinct is what is “represented” (by
affects and ideas); in others, it is itself the psychical
“representative” of organic forces that are not yet clearly known. In
his introductory note to “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
111-16
CARDINAL
), the editor of
the Standard Edition
ORG
calls attention to the main passages in
Freud
ORG
concerned with this question: the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
(addition of
1915
DATE
), Section III of the
Schreber
DATE
case (
1911
DATE
), “On Narcissism” (
1914
DATE
), “The Unconscious” and
“Repression”
WORK_OF_ART
(
1915
DATE
), Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
(
1920
DATE
), and the
Encyclopaedia
ORG
Britannica
PRODUCT
article (
1926
DATE
). I fully agree with the editor that the ambiguity is of little moment;
the important point for us is that an instinct is knowable only in its
psychical representatives. They are what determine its psychological
status. The solution of the ambiguity no doubt lies in the notion of
primal repression which establishes the very
first
ORDINAL
“fixation” of the psychical representative to an instinct. We discuss this point further in the following footnote.
“distortion” (
Entstellung
PERSON
) (the latter term having already served to characterize the group of
procedures constituting the dream-work). It is repression, in fact, that
cuts instincts off from consciousness; but it does not cut them off
from their psychical representatives; it cannot do this, for instincts
are themselves representatives of the organic. That is why the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious is a psychical unconscious; it is made up of psychical
representatives (it being understood that this expression covers not
only ideas—what the
Traumdeutung
PERSON
called dream-thoughts—but also affects, which will subsequently pose a rather difficult problem).
On
the other hand, however, repression prevents us from directly grasping
the primary psychical expression of instincts: we can only postulate it.
The “remoteness” of the known and recognized expressions of an
instinct, as compared with its primal expression, is always greater than
one might imagine.
Freud
ORG
expresses this by saying that repression proper (eigentliche) is a
secondary
ORDINAL
repression as compared with a primal repression (
Urverdrdngung
GPE
), “which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct [der psychischen (
Vorstellungs-
PERSON
)
Reprasentanz
PERSON
des
Triebes
PERSON
] being denied entrance into the conscious.” Hence, what we take to be
58
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
250
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
148
CARDINAL
. Any current systematic study of the
Freudian
NORP
concept of repression should pay close attention to the work of
Peter Madison
PERSON
,
Freud’s Concept of Repression and Defense
ORG
(see Part I,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
1
CARDINAL
, n.
20
CARDINAL
). In it the author applies the epistemological concerns of the
Carnap
PERSON
school and attempts to clarify the
Freudian
NORP
concept by distinguishing and interrelating
two
CARDINAL
levels, an “observational language” and a “theoretical language.” The
first
ORDINAL
uses terms that refer to the observable manifestations of the interplay between instincts and anticathexis; the
second
ORDINAL
contains terms that refer to unobservable features of this interaction
of forces. The varied manifestations of this hypothesized interaction
explain the baffling complexity of
Freud
ORG
’s formulations. In
the “Preliminary Communication”
EVENT
of
1892
DATE
(Studies on
Hysteria
GPE
, Ch. 1) “repression” meant unconsciously motivated forgetting of things
that the patient wished to forget, as is observable in cases of
hysteria; thus repression referred specifically to hysterical amnesia,
as
Freud
ORG
himself reaffirmed in the important eleventh chapter of
Inhibitions
ORG
, Symptoms and
Anxiety (1926
DATE
). However, the term “defense” was also used synonymously with
repression: “defense, that is, repressing ideas from consciousness.” A
second
ORDINAL
complication was that there are other defensive mechanisms besides
hysterical amnesia, such as conversion, projection, substitution, and
isolation (isolation, according to the “rat-man” case, allows the
ideational content to enter consciousness but deprived of its affective
cathexis). Then the concept of defense was dropped from
Freud
ORG
’s
the primal expression of an instinct is in fact the product
of a fixation; the relation between expression and instinct never
appears to us except as one that has been established, sedimented,
“fixed.” In order to attain an immediate expression one would have to be
able to go back beyond this primal repression. (We are not questioning
PERSON
terminology and replaced by the concept of repression until
1926
DATE
; in the
1915
DATE
article, repression is formally defined as follows: “the essence of
repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a
distance, from the conscious.” The concept is taken here in its
theoretical dimension: it covers a variety of mechanisms which are
operative in
three
CARDINAL
different types of neurosis; but repression is, in turn,
only one
CARDINAL
of the vicissitudes of an instinct; the defensive process would thus
seem to cover the whole group of these vicissitudes. Hence it is not
exactly correct to say that the concept of repression was substituted
for that of defense, even though the latter practically disappeared from
Freud
ORG
’s vocabulary until
1926
DATE
. The revival of the concept of defense in
Inhibitions
ORG
,
Symptoms and Anxiety
ORG
to designate all the techniques the ego makes use of in conflicts that
may lead to a neurosis is therefore not unexpected: once again
Freud
ORG
mentions—in addition to the keeping away from consciousness, which is
seen clearly in hysterical repression—“isolation” and “regression” to an
earlier
Iibidinal
PERSON
stage, as in obsessional neurosis; he also mentions a procedure that
consists in magically “undoing” what has been done. All these mechanisms
are defensive in the sense that they protect the ego against
instinctual demands. But it is only in the chapter entitled “Addenda”
that the concept of repression is not only subordinated to that of
defense but restricted once more to hysterical amnesia; in the main body
of the work the other defensive mechanisms are at times treated as
forms of repression.
Madison
PERSON
suggests that repression and defense were “inextricably linked to
consciousness in a way that did not allow separation through a simple
agreement on terminology” (p.
27
CARDINAL
). The
first
ORDINAL
task of an epistemology is to classify the various observable effects
resulting from the unobservable inner conflicts and to reserve the
concept of defense for those mechanisms that have a basic purpose in
common, viz. the preventive protection of the ego against anxiety. Part I
of
Madison
PERSON
’s book is devoted to this classification. Psychoanalysis is mainly
concerned with defenses that have failed; the successful ones,
Freud
ORG
said in
1915
DATE
, escape our examination. Among the successful mechanisms of defense,
Freud
ORG
cites the “destruction of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex” (which is “more than a repression” in that the impulse itself
is destroyed in the id), rejection based on judgement, and especially
sublimation, which we shall discuss elsewhere in its connection with
desexualization. In Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
,
Freud
ORG
suggests that the instincts themselves may be modified by becoming
absorbed, sublimated, or repressed; an example of absorption would be
the formation of character traits. As for the unsuccessful defenses,
these may be divided into repressive and nonrepressive defenses; the
first
ORDINAL
achieve^the effect of ego protection by altering the idea attached to a
dangerous impulse; amnesia is but one of the modes of this type of
mechanism,
here the clinical reality of primal repression but rather its epistemological implications.) As far as I know, however,
Freud
ORG
never stated the conditions under which one could go back beyond primal repression.
Primal repression means that we are always in the mediate, in
DATE
along with conversion, displacement, projection, reaction-formation,
isolation, undoing, and denial. The criterion of the degree of
repression is given by the degree of distortion and remoteness of the
derivatives of the unconscious in dreams, symptoms, and the various
signs and disguises of the repressed instinct.
One
CARDINAL
may speak of “nonrepressive defense” in the case of regression involving a substitution of
one
CARDINAL
drive for another (for instance, the return to a pregenital sex
interest) but with no alteration of the attached idea. Some defense
mechanisms, however, do not seem to fall under this alternative of
repressive and nonrepressive defenses; these include purely emotional
inhibitions, which
Freud
ORG
mentions as examples of vicissitudes separated from affects: here the
impulses are prevented from developing into full affective
manifestation.
Freud
ORG
still calls this a case of repression (
1915
DATE
), although the affective inhibition is not achieved through distortion
of the ideational content. Finally, what is to be said of the concept of
resistance? What is its relation to the concept of repression? From
certain texts it is clear that resistance is
one
CARDINAL
of the manifestations of repression, the
one
CARDINAL
the therapeutic work encounters as an obstacle to its progress. This
manifestation is on the same footing as symptom formation; the patient
engages in it as a defense measure against recovery, which the ego
regards as a new danger. But resistance also covers a variety of
directly observable actions (silence, elusiveness, repetition, etc.). As
a hypothesized force resistance belongs to the theoretical concepts; it
is the counterpart, in the analytic situation, of anticathexis; and the
notion of anticathexis explicitly serves to define primal repression (
secondary
ORDINAL
repression, or repression proper, being a withdrawal of the Pcs.
cathexis). Thanks to this chain of ideas
(resistance-anticathexis-repression) the concept of resistance operates
on several levels: on the most general level, it is the name given to
repression in the analytic situation; on the theoretical level, the
counterforce operative in this situation is identified with what the
theory of repression called anticathexis; on the observational level, it
includes all the measures the patient uses to evade the rules of
therapy; in this connection, the most powerful form of resistance is the
one that makes use of the transference to obstruct the work of the
analysis.
Thus the theory of repression includes not only a
highly complex network of observable effects, but a system of
unobservable opposed forces; this system underwent many changes in the
Freudian
NORP
doctrine, for it is inseparable from the theory of sexual organizations
and the successive theories of instinct. A highly abstract form of the
theory was reached with the distinction between “primal repression” and
“after-repression” (or “repression proper”). The former places at the
disposition of the latter a store of repressed infantile experiences;
thanks to primal repression, all repression
the already
expressed, the already said. We are all the more compelled to deal with
mere derivatives because of repression proper; “the
second
ORDINAL
stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative [psychische
Abkom
PERSON
-mlinge der verdrdngten
Reprasentanz
ORG
], or such trains of thought [
Gedankenziige
GPE
] as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it.” <
69
CARDINAL
> The unconscious appears, then, as a
consists in a
transformation of affects, in virtue of which what formerly generated
pleasure henceforth generates unpleasure, in the form, for example, of
disgust. The most complete analysis of the theory of primal repression
occurs in the
Schreber
DATE
case (
1911
DATE
), Section III; the short paper of
1915
DATE
is a restatement of that analysis in condensed form. In the earlier
text the fixation characteristic of primal repression is the condition
of repression proper; this latter is divided into
two
CARDINAL
processes, repulsion exercised by the conscious system and attraction
exercised by the unconscious. The theory reached its most abstract form
in
1915
DATE
with the concept of anticathexis; this notion assumes that the
instinctual force and the counterforce operate as constant opposed
pressures; the counterforce is defined simply as energy directed against
the instincts. This system, mechanistic in appearance, is actually a
“motivational” system. This is the whole point of the discussion of the
relationship between repression and defense: the entire system is
oriented toward the idea of protection against inner dangers (libidinal
or moral) even more than against external and physical ones. It is
understandable that anxiety, long regarded as an effect of repression
(in
1915
DATE
it was
one
CARDINAL
of the separate vicissitudes of affect, conversion into anxiety), was able, in
1926
DATE
, to take on an anticipatory or signal function: whereas traumatic
anxiety consists in the wholly passive helplessness of the ego in the
face of an overwhelming danger (the traumatic situation), signal anxiety
anticipates this traumatic situation; it actively repeats the trauma in
a weakened version, with the hope of directing its course. By way of
contrast, primal repression seems to be connected with what is now
called traumatic anxiety; Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
had already described as “traumatic” any breach in the protective
shield against stimuli; before it is able to make use of anticipatory
anxiety the ego’s only recourse is to act on the innate tendency to
restore an earlier state of repose; primal repression, which seems to
concern simply the nonsatisfaction of infantile needs, is from now on
sharply distinguished from all the mechanisms succeeding the formation
of the superego and which
Freud
ORG
now characterizes as anticipatory or signal anxiety; such anxiety
functions as a warning that an earlier danger situation is threatening
to recur.
So much for the extraordinary network of facts and theories that characterize
Freud
ORG
’s concept of repression. In the “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
1
CARDINAL
, pp.
35558
CARDINAL
, we shall speak of Part II of
Peter Madison’s
PERSON
book and his attempt to apply
Carnap
PERSON
’s rules to
Freudianism
ORG
.
59
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
250
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
148
CARDINAL
.
ramified network made up of the indefinite branchings of those
derivatives or “offshoots”; as such it forms a system and is open to
what psychoanalysts call an intrasystemic investigation. But still it is
a system of psychical expressions, and the whole of analysis lies in
the art of interpreting those derivatives in their relation to ever more
primitive expressions of instinct, according to the degree of their
remoteness and distortion. <
70
CARDINAL
> Thus the derivatives’ relations of remoteness and distortion
correspond, on the side of the analyzed psychism, to the aforementioned
relations of translation (Vber-setiung) on the side of analysis itself.
Thanks to this correlation, at the level of psychical expressions,
between the work of repression and the work of analysis, everything we
were able to treat under the heading of “the [energic] vicissitude of
instincts” comes to language as the vicissitude of their psychical
expressions.
<70> “
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
is able to show us other things as well which are important for
understanding the effects of repression in the psychoneuroses. It shows
us, for instance, that the instinctual representative develops with less
interference and more profusely if it is withdrawn by repression from
conscious influence. It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes
on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and
presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but
frighten him by giving him the picture [durch die
Vorspiegelung
ORG
] of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct [
Triebstdrke
ORG
]. This deceptive [tduschende] strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in fantasy [in der
Phantasie
PERSON
] and of the damming-up [
Aufstauung
PERSON
] consequent on frustrated satisfaction [infolge versagter
Befriedigung
PERSON
]” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
251
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
149
CARDINAL
).
It is therefore in this notion of psychical expression, of
psychical representative, that the economics and the hermeneutics
coincide; the distance between the
two
CARDINAL
psychoanalytic universes of discourse, which appeared insurmountable on the level of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, seems to have vanished in
the “Papers on Metapsychology-
WORK_OF_ART
”
We have still not come to the end of the problem. Everything would be fine if we could simply equate psychical expressions (
Reprasentanz
ORG
) with representations (
Vorstellungen
ORG
), i.e. with ideas of things. Ideas, however, are
only one
CARDINAL
category of psychical expressions; we have pretended to ignore that
there is another category, that of affects, and that these have a
different vicissitude or
destiny which may well be of greater importance for psychoanalysis than the destiny of ideas.
Thus
we seem to be set adrift. Will not affects be the refuge of an economic
explanation that has been split off from exegetical interpretation? Are
not affects purely quantitative? In short, is it not the case that
interpretation and the economic explanation coincide in the vicissitude
of ideas, that is to say, in the least important vicissitude, only to be
separated from each other once again in the vicissitude of affects?
Let us return to the texts.
First
ORDINAL
it should be noted that
Freud
ORG
was very careful to bracket the question of affects and to elaborate
his theory of the unconscious contents on the basis of the equivalence
between psychical expressions and ideas (
Reprasentanz
PERSON
and
Vorstellung
PERSON
); in this respect there is a parallel between the initial step of the
two
CARDINAL
texts in question. It is only in a
second
ORDINAL
phase that the content within the brackets is reintroduced: “In our
discussion so far we have dealt with the repression of an instinctual
representative, and by the latter we have understood an idea or group of
ideas which is cathected with a definite quota [
Betrag
PERSON
] of psychical energy (libido or interest) coming from an instinct [vom
Trieb her]” This “quota of affect” (Affektbetrag) constitutes the “other
element of the psychical representative”; and what forces us to study
it as a theme in its own right is repression, inasmuch as repression
confers on it a different vicissitude.
Freud
ORG
calls this other element “the quantitative factor of the instinctual
representative,” or again “the quota of affect belonging to the
representative,” or
61
CARDINAL
. The end of “Repression,”
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
254
CARDINAL
ff.; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
152
CARDINAL
ff.; and Section III of “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
275
CARDINAL
-79; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
176
CARDINAL
-79.
62
CARDINAL
. “
Clinical
ORG
observation now obliges us to divide up what we have
63. I
64. Ibid.
hitherto
regarded as a single entity; for it shows us that besides the idea,
some other element representing the instinct has to be taken into
account, and that this other element undergoes vicissitudes of
repression which may be quite different from those undergone by the
idea. For this other element of the psychical representative the term
quota of affect has been generally adopted. It corresponds to the
instinct in so far as the latter has become detached from the idea and
finds expression, proportionate to its quantity, in processes which are
sensed as affects [als
Affekte der Empfindung
ORG
]” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
255
CARDINAL
,
14
CARDINAL
,
152
CARDINAL
).
again “the instinctual energy linked to [the idea].”
Sometimes he even speaks of “the quantitative portion” as opposed to the
“ideational portion.” Is not this
second
ORDINAL
factor
one
CARDINAL
of pure energy? Are we not thereby reduced to physics? No, for even
when separated from the idea, the instinct becomes sensibly observable
in affects in which it “finds expression, proportionate to its
quantity.” The vicissitudes of quantity are vicissitudes of affects.
Freud
ORG
distinguishes
three
CARDINAL
of them: no affect (as in what
Charcot
PERSON
called "la belle indifference” of hysterical patients); an affect that
is “qualitatively colored”; and finally, “anxiety.” Only the last
two
CARDINAL
merit being called a “transformation” (Umsetzung) of the psychical energies of instincts into affects.
Thus we again come upon the quantity that has been perplexing us ever since
the “Project
EVENT
”! We were correct in saying that such a quantity is not subject to
measurement but rather to a process of diagnosis and interpretation, for
apart from the vicissitudes of ideas, it can only be grasped in the
vicissitudes of affects. We had already remarked, moreover, that the
principle of constancy, which concretizes the notion of quantity, is
nothing else than the pleasure-unpleasure regulation. The separate
vicissitude of affect brings out the meaning of that regulation; it is
when repression is struggling with affects that repression discloses its
true meaning in relation to the pleasure-unpleasure principle:
We
recall the fact that the motive and purpose of repression was nothing
else than the avoidance of unpleasure. It follows that the vicissitude
of the quota of affect belonging to the [instinctual] representative is
far more important than the vicissitude of the idea, and this fact is
decisive for our assessment [of the success or failure] of the process
of repression.
That is why
Freud
ORG
undertakes to give a new interpretation of the theory of the neuroses
within the double perspective of the vicissitude of the “ideational
portion” and the vicissitude of the “quantitative portion.” The manner
in which he does this is not important for us here except for the
conceptualization involved: “substitutive
65. All of these expressions are found in the
third
ORDINAL
part of “Repression.”
formations,” “symptoms,” the “return of the repressed,” and so on.
The
paper entitled “Repression” definitely enables us to say that the
“quantitative portion” is recognizable only in affects. However, by
distinguishing between the vicissitudes of ideas and those of affects,
it leaves open the question whether the economic explanation of affects
is not irreducible to the interpretation of ideas, or, in other words,
whether interpretation is not fixed upon ideas and the economic
explanation upon affects. If “the true task of repression” lies in
“dealing with the quota of affect,” is it not the case that the
economics of repression is ultimately irreducible to any interpretation
of meaning through meaning?
Section III of “The Unconscious”
seems to move in this direction, for it expressly links the economic
point of view with the consideration of affects; the topographical point
of view, on the contrary, was introduced in Section II on the basis of
the identification of psychical expressions with ideas. In a sense that
is purely topographic and not yet economic,
Freud
ORG
reminds us, at
the beginning of Section III
EVENT
, that “an instinct can never become an object of consciousness—only the
idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious,
moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea.”
The triple vicissitude of affects poses a specifically economic problem,
that of the “processes of discharge” (Abfuhrvorgdngen) In this sense we
must speak of “access to affects” just as we speak of access to
motility; in both cases it is a question of discharge, and in both cases
consciousness is the guardian of the discharge. This is quite true; but
the separate vicissitudes of affects should not make us forget that
affects remain affects of ideas. That is why it was possible and
necessary to begin by bracketing affects. We are being duped by language
if we think we have established a strict parallel between ideas and
affects. Thus, when we speak of an unconscious feeling or emotion—
unconscious anxiety, an unconscious feeling of guilt—we forget
67
CARDINAL
. This section contains a rather systematic enumeration of affects according to their degree of discharge; at
one
CARDINAL
end there are the “instinctual impulses” (
Triebregungen
NORP
), and at the other the “sense impressions” or “feelings
” (Empfindungen).
68
WORK_OF_ART
. /GW,
JO
ORG
,
275
CARDINAL
-76;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
177
CARDINAL
.
that, stricto sensu, the feeling is felt, hence conscious: “We
can only mean an instinctual impulse [Triebregung] the ideational
representative of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into
consideration.” <
71><72
CARDINAL
> We always designate an affect by the idea of which it is the
affect; and when we speak improperly of “unconscious” affects, it is
because we misconstrue the original representative connection and regard
the affect as the manifestation of an idea that is not proper to it.
<
71
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
276
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
177
CARDINAL
.
<
72
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
211
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
178
CARDINAL
.
It may be objected, however, that this strictness of vocabulary
concerns only the descriptive point of view; from the systematic point
of view the vicissitude of the quantitative factor remains a distinct
vicissitude: the notion of unconscious affect is again required when we
consider the specific effects of repression on the discharge of affect
and the
three
CARDINAL
vicissitudes of that discharge which we have already mentioned above.
But what is an inhibited affect? A repressed idea continues to exist as
“an actual structure [reale
Bildung
PERSON
] in the system
Ucs
GPE
."
71
CARDINAL
A repressed affect, on the other hand, is rather obscurely designated
as a potential beginning (Ansatzmoglichkeit) which is prevented from
developing. <
73
CARDINAL
> We know nothing about these “processes of discharge”
(Abfuhrvor-gange) apart from their psychical expressions or
manifestations, which are perceived as “feelings” (
Empfindungert
PERSON
). At most we can only trace out a certain path, mark off a certain
development, starting from those affective potencies of which we know
very little, moving thence to instinctual impulses, and finally to
explicit affects. This is the path upon which we placed ourselves
earlier when we spoke of the conscious system’s control over the release
of affect in the same terms we use for the control of consciousness
over motility.
<
73
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
But even so we should not overlook the fact that a pure affect,
an affect that has come directly from the unconscious—such as anxiety
with no particular object—is an affect waiting for a substitutive idea
to which it can attach itself. An affect that we describe as being
severed from its idea is an affect in search of a new ideational support
by which it can penetrate into consciousness.
Therefore we can
neither reduce affects and their quantitative factor to ideas, nor treat
them as a distinct reality. At any rate, the difference between affects
and ideas is the basis for the distinction between the topography and
the economics. The theory of affects offers certain possibilities of
autonomy to the economic point of view.
Section IV of “
LAW
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
” goes to the extreme limit of these possibilities by presenting the economics as a
third
ORDINAL
point of view in addition to the dynamic and topographic ones; in this section
Freud
ORG
attempts “to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and
to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude.”
<74> This is the consummation,
Freud
ORG
says, of psychological research: “I propose that when we have succeeded
in describing a psychical process in all its dynamic, topographical and
economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological
presentation. We must say at once that in the present state of our
knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in
this.” <
75>
TIME
<
74
CARDINAL
> 'dw,
10
CARDINAL
,
280
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
181
CARDINAL
.
<
75
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
This “tentative effort” and its “few points” actually amount to
a new and systematic treatment of the theory of the neuroses along the
lines of the article “Repression.” But this time, instead of following
the separate vicissitudes of ideas and affects,
Freud
ORG
constructs a sort of typology or combination system by uniting in different ways the
two
CARDINAL
orders of psychical expressions. I will not enter into this sketch of
the clinical catalogue of the neuroses either here or elsewhere; I
simply wish to point out the shift in language and conceptualization
that occurs in this section. The analysis moves in the direction of a
pure economics; it is concerned solely with the placement and
displacement of cathexis, withdrawal of cathexis, and anticathexis:
“Thus there is a withdrawal of the pre-conscious cathexis, retention of
the cathexis, or replacement of the preconscious cathexis by an
unconscious one.” <
76
DATE
> That
Freud
ORG
envisages here an actual substitution of the economic explanation for
the topographical one is clearly implied in the solution he provides to
the strictly topographical hypothesis of the double registration; the
earlier hypothesis is replaced by the strictly economic hypoth-
<
76
DATE
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
279
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
180
CARDINAL
.
esis of a change in the state of cathexis, and he adds: “The
functional hypothesis has here easily defeated the topographical one.”
<
77
CARDINAL
> To this sequence of withdrawal, retention, and replacement of cathexis
Freud
ORG
adds another economic mechanism, anticathexis, which he says is the
sole mechanism of primal repression and the means by which the
preconscious system protects itself from the pressure exerted on it by
unconscious ideas. A bit further on he will also add the mechanism of
hypercathexis.
<
77
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
The theory of the unconscious thus seems to have swung to the
side of a pure economics. The dominant factor is no longer the
vicissitudes of ideas within a history of meaning; ideas now seem to be
but the anchorage point for the genuine processes, which are economic in
nature and which
Freud
ORG
schematizes in the ordered play of cathexes.
Must we not go further and say that in the end the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious is characterized more by energy than by meaning? Section V (“
Special Characteristics of the System Ucs
WORK_OF_ART
.”), which we have already alluded to as having an antiphenomenological
theme but have not really explored, characterizes the unconscious system
much more in terms of the discharge of affects than in terms of ideas:
“The nucleus of the Ucs. consists of instinctual representatives which
seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful
impulses [
Wunschregungen
ORG
].” <78>
DATE
<
78
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
285
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
186
CARDINAL
.
That is why the characteristics of the unconscious, which we
have already enumerated, all bear the mark of nonmeaning [du
non-signifiant]. <
79
CARDINAL
> If “there are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of
certainty,” the reason is that impulses coexist without any relations of
meaning: “In the Ucs. there are only contents, cathected with greater
or lesser strength.” If the primary process is dominant, it is because
the cathexes are more mobile here and the displacements and
condensations effected more easily. If the unconscious is timeless
(zeitlos), it is because it has, properly speaking, no reference to
time: we are not yet at the level of a transcendental esthetic;
“reference to time,”
Freud
ORG
tells us, “is bound up with the work of the system
Cs
PERSON
.” Lastly, the dominance of the pleasure principle means that the fate
of the unconscious processes “depends only on how strong they are and on
whether they fulfill the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure
regulation.”
<
79
CARDINAL
> “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
,” Section V.
As for the act of becoming conscious, it too is
defined in an economic way, when we consider that it “is no mere act of
perception, but is probably also a hypercathexis, a further advance in
the psychical organization.”
All these characteristics of the systems bring us back very close to
the “Project
ORG
,” that is, to the
two
CARDINAL
states of cathectic energy, the tonically bound state and the mobile
state. The final step in the triumph of the economic over the
topographical point of view is taken when the critical frontier is moved
back from between the preconscious and the conscious to between the
unconscious and the preconscious.
Let us call a halt here and
take an overall view of the problem. The path we have taken has
consisted in a gradual reversal of priorities. At the start we raised
the problem of the psychical representative of instincts; we bracketed
affects and started from the primacy of ideas in the topographical
structure of the unconscious. Next we removed the parentheses from
affects and attempted to subordinate the quota of affect to ideas. We
then considered the vicissitude proper to this quantitative factor, and
this consideration led us to add the economic to the topographical point
of view and to give the interplay of cathexes primacy over meaning.
I think I am being fair to the
Freudian
NORP
systematization in drawing
two
CARDINAL
conclusions from this whole discussion:
First
ORDINAL
, the irreducible character of affects, from the economic point of
view—that is, from the point of view of the interplay of
cathexes—exposes a situation whose traits become progressively more
precise, if we compare our present conclusion with those of our chapters
on
the “Project” and The Interpretation of Dreams: the language
ORG
of force can never be overcome by the language of meaning. This does
not differ from what we said at the end of the preceding chapters when
we posited that the topography and its
19yGW
CARDINAL
,
10
CARDINAL
,
292
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
194
CARDINAL
.
SO.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
193
CARDINAL
.
naturalistic naivete are suited to the very essence of desire,
inasmuch as desires are “indestructible,” “immortal,” that is to say,
always prior to language and culture. <
80
CARDINAL
>
PERSON
<
80>
TIME
We will return to the status of desire in
the “Dialectic,” Ch
ORG
.
2
CARDINAL
; what is represented in atfects and does not pass over into ideas is
desire qua desire; psychoanalysis is the frontier knowledge of this
unnameable factor at the root of speech; it is the factor to which we
will look for the ultimate justification of the “economic point of
view,” within the context of a philosophy of reflection.
Second
ORDINAL
, it is impossible to realize this pure economics apart from the
representable and the sayable; we cannot hypostatize the un-nameable of
desire, on pain of falling short of a “psycho-logy.” That is what
prevents us from constructing a theory of
Reprasentanz
ORG
. The latter cannot, of course, be reduced to a theory of
“representation” in the sense of ideas, since affects “represent”
instincts and instincts “represent” the body “to the mind.” But the mere
verbal as-sonnance—which so perplexes the translator—betrays a profound
kinship between
Reprasentanz
ORG
and “representation” in the sense of ideas. In any case, no economics
can efface the fact that affects are the charge of ideas; the separating
of affects from ideas is a further aspect of this intentional
connection, which may be stretched out indefinitely but never nullified;
that is why affects look for another ideational support to force their
way into consciousness.
So little did
Freud
ORG
reduce the interpretation of meaning to the economics of force that the paper on “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
” ends with a significant circular movement that takes us back to the
starting point, that is, to the deciphering of the unconscious in its
“derivatives.” This return to the point of departure deserves to be
examined for the structure of its argumentation. The topography
separated the systems from
one
CARDINAL
other, and the economics completed that separation with the theory that
each system has its own peculiar laws (the intrasystemic relations).
But the economics also requires that we finally come to consider the
intersystemic relations; that is why “The Unconscious” ends not with the
“special characteristics of the unconscious system” but with a
consideration of the “communication between the systems.” <
81
CARDINAL
> Only then will there be a
<81>
“The Unconscious,” Section VI
WORK_OF_ART
.
true “recognition” or “assessment” of the unconscious. The
communication between the systems can only be deciphered, however, in
the meaningful architecture of the derivatives: “In brief, it must be
said that the
Ucs
GPE
. is continued into [setzt sich in] what are known as derivatives.”
Freud
ORG
especially focuses on those derivatives which present both the highly
organized features of the conscious system and the characteristics of
the unconscious; we are well acquainted with these hybrid formations as
the fantasies of both normal and neurotic people and as substitute
formations. The composite nature of fantasies assures us that the
unconscious must always be deciphered, or diagnosed, in what we called
at the end of our previous analysis the “symptom of being conscious.”
Furthermore, these derivatives of the unconscious, these “intermediaries
between the
two
CARDINAL
systems,” not only afford access to the unconscious but open the way to
influencing it—which is what psychoanalytic treatment is based upon.
What
is the meaning of this circular movement of the argumentation? This
movement would be unintelligible if the economic point of view were to
free itself entirely from the interpretation of meaning through meaning.
Psychoanalysis never confronts one with bare forces, but always with
forces in search of meaning; this link between force and meaning makes
instinct a psychical reality, or, more exactly, the limit concept at the
frontier between the organic and the psychical. The link between
hermeneutics and economics may be stretched as far as possible—and the
theory of affects marks the extreme point of that distention in the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology; still the link cannot be broken, for otherwise the economics would cease to belong to a pjyc/toanalysis.
83
CARDINAL
. “Die Agnoszierung des
Unbewussten
ORG
,” Section VII of “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
.”
The Standard Edition
WORK_OF_ART
translates this as “
Assessment of the Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
” (
14
CARDINAL
,
196
CARDINAL
); the translation in
Collected Papers
ORG
,
4
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
, is
“Recognition of the Unconscious
ORG
.”
The
first
ORDINAL
part of our “
Analytic
NORP
” was concerned with an epistemology of psychoanalysis, that is to say,
an investigation of psychoanalytic “statements” and the position they
hold within discourse. The
second
ORDINAL
part will deal with the interpretation of culture. In
the “Problematic”
EVENT
we spoke of the importance of
Freud
ORG
’s interpretation of culture in relation to a phenomenology of religion
and of the sacred in general and placed it, along with the ideas of
Marx
PERSON
and
Nietzsche
ORG
, among the forms of the destruction of the sacred and as
one
CARDINAL
of the enterprises of demystification. We shall now proceed to justify that place on the basis of the “
Analytic
NORP
.” From this point on, therefore, we shall enter into the great antinomy
of hermeneutics, the antinomy of founding and destroying, while
reserving the right to reexamine the problem in the “
Dialectic
NORP
.”
The analysis we can make of the cultural phenomenon in this
second
ORDINAL
part presents
three
CARDINAL
aspects:
1
CARDINAL
. In the
first
ORDINAL
place the exegesis of culture is simply an application of
psychoanalysis by way of analogy with the interpretation of dreams and
the neuroses. By this
first
ORDINAL
trait we characterize both the validity and the limits of a
psychoanalytic interpretation of culture. Its validity and limits are
not to be found in the object, that is, in what it thematizes, but
rather in the point of view, that is, in its operative concepts. The
field to which psychoanalysis may be applied has no boundary; in this
sense its field is unlimited. But the perspective employed is determined
by the topographic-economic point of view which gives psychoanalysis
its rights: in this sense psychoanalysis has limits, which, as
elsewhere, are a determinant of its validity. Everything psychoanalysis
says about art, morality, and
religion is determined in
two
CARDINAL
ways:
first
ORDINAL
by the topographic-economic model which constitutes the
Freudian
NORP
“metapsychology,” and
second
ORDINAL
by the example of dreams, which furnish the
first
ORDINAL
term of a series of analogues that can be drawn out indefinitely, from the oneiric to the sublime.
Let us insist upon this double limitation: limitation by the model, limitation by the example. The
first
ORDINAL
limitation means that we must not look to psychoanalysis for what it
has forbidden itself to give, namely, a problematic of the primal [V
originate}. Everything that is “primary” in analysis—the primary
process, primal repression, primary narcissism, and, later on, primary
masochism—is primary in a sense that is completely different from the
transcendental: it is not a question of the justification or grounds,
but of what takes precedence in the order of distortion or disguise.
Thus the primary process expresses the hallucinatory wish-fulfillments
that precede all other fantasy formations; primal repression decides
which idea will be attached to an instinct
first
ORDINAL
; primary narcissism denotes the reservoir underlying all
object-cathexes and the source from which all instincts proceed. But
what is
first
ORDINAL
for analysis is never
first
ORDINAL
for reflection; the primary is not a ground. Hence we must not ask
psychoanalysis to resolve questions as to root origins, either in the
order of reality or in the order of value. It is to be understood that
ideals and illusions will be regarded only as the vicissitudes of
instincts, as derivatives more or less “distant,” more or less
“deformed,” of the psychical expressions of instinct. Esthetic
creativity and pleasure, ideals of moral life, illusions in the
religious sphere, will figure simply as elements on the economic balance
sheet of instincts, as expenditures in pleasure-unpleasure;
one
CARDINAL
will speak of them and can only speak of them in terms of cathexis,
withdrawal of cathexis, hypercathexis, and anticathexis, according to
the economic combination system outlined above (p.
147
CARDINAL
). In this sense the analytic theory of culture is an applied psychoanalysis.
At
the same time that it applies the conceptual model elaborated in the
metapsychological papers, the exegesis of culture also generalizes the
dream exemplar; or rather, we should say it generalizes the pair formed
by dreams and the neuroses, according to the key place the Introductory
Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
assigns to them
at the head of all the applications of
psychoanalysis. Dreams propose to applied psychoanalysis precisely the
structure defended by
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
to the point of intransigence under the heading of “wish-fulfillment” (
WunscherfUllung
ORG
). We recall that it was to account for this fulfillment and its triple
regression that the topography was worked out, starting from the time of
the “Project
ORG
.” Thus psychoanalysis offers to the interpretation of culture the
submodel of wish-fulfillment. The psychoanalytic interpretation of
culture generalizes this prototype of all cultural phenomena. This is
the
second
ORDINAL
sense in which psychoanalysis is limited: it knows cultural phenomena
only as analogues of the wish-fulfillment illustrated by dreams. The
best way to do justice to
Freud
ORG
’s essays on art, morality, and religion is to take them as essays in
applied psychoanalysis and as an “analogous” interpretation. We are not,
or at least not yet, confronted with a total explanation, but with one
that is fragmentary, though extremely penetrating in the narrowness of
its attack.
Such is, as I see it, the double internal limitation
of this interpretation (which has no external boundaries) of cultural
phenomena.
2
CARDINAL
. But we have not touched upon its essential feature so long as we
characterize the psychoanalytic exegesis of culture simply as applied
psychoanalysis and as an analogical interpretation. Upon a careful
reading, it is evident that the application and transposition have
reacted upon and transformed the model itself, the formal model of the
economics and the material model of dreams. Consequently, Part II may be
taken as a new reading on a deeper level, in the course of which
psychoanalysis, by being applied outside the original area of dreams and
the neuroses, will unfold its proper meaning and approach its initial
philosophical horizon (cf. above, p.
86
CARDINAL
).
The crucial point is the transition to the
second
ORDINAL
topography of ego, id, and superego. This transition presents special
difficulties, for the new triad does not do away with the
first
ORDINAL
, nor can it be said that it is simply an addition, at least not in the
same conceptual framework. The consideration of the roles or agencies
that distinguish the
second
ORDINAL
topography from the
first
ORDINAL
does not stem from a simple correction of the theory of the
three
CARDINAL
systems (unconscious,
preconscious, and conscious). The
second
ORDINAL
topography is of a different order. That is why we did not introduce it
under the heading of the psychoanalytic epistemology, which may be
regarded, if not as achieved, at least as sufficiently motivated by the
first
ORDINAL
topography. We preferred to couple it with the interpretation of
culture so as to underscore, on the one hand, that the interpretation of
culture is much more than a by-product of psychoanalysis, since it is
bound up with the conception of the
second
ORDINAL
topography, and on the other hand, that the
second
ORDINAL
topography is not a mere reworking of the
first
ORDINAL
, since it arises from a confrontation of the libido with the non-libidinal factor that manifests itself as culture. The
first
ORDINAL
topography remained tied to an economics of instinct, with instinct as
the one basic concept; the division of the topography into
three
CARDINAL
systems was made in relation to the libido alone. The
second
ORDINAL
topography is an economics of a new type: here the libido is subject to
something other than itself, to a demand for renunciation that creates a
new economic situation. Hence the topography now sets into play not a
series of systems for a solipsistic libido but a series of roles—
personal, impersonal, suprapersonal—of a libido situated within a
culture. The reason we reserve the
second
ORDINAL
topography for the end of Part II is to stress its intimate connection
with the exegesis of culture. It could be said that the theory of
culture, as an application of psychoanalysis, proceeds from the
first
ORDINAL
topography, but that, by way of rebound, it gives rise to a new topography which is its culmination; the essay entitled
The Ego and the Id is the important expression
WORK_OF_ART
of this expansion of psychoanalysis.
3
CARDINAL
. However, we have not yet done full justice to the interpretation of culture by linking it to the
second
ORDINAL
topography. To move from a fragmentary,
one
CARDINAL
-sided, and solely analogical view of cultural phenomena to a systematic
view of culture, a much more radical recasting of the theory of
instinct is required. The problem of culture will be elaborated in a
unified manner when we take into account the death instinct and the
reinterpretation of the libido as
Eros
LOC
over against death. The final interpretation is not to be sought in The Ego and the Id, but in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. Between Eros and death, culture will represent the great theater of the “battle of the giants.”
At
the same time, however, we shall have reached the point where
psychoanalysis turns from science to philosophy, perhaps even to
mythology. Part II of
the “Analytic”
WORK_OF_ART
will remain on this side of that point, halfway between the still
reassuring slopes of applied psychoanalysis and the summits—or chasms—of
a new dramaturgy, all the “personages” of which are mythical: Eros,
Thanatos, and
Ananke
PERSON
. This mythico-philosophical dramaturgy will be the subject of Part III of the “
Analytic
NORP
.”
PERSON
Chapter 1
LAW
:
The Analogy of Dreams
ORG
THE PRIVILEGED PLACE OF DREAMS
The privileged place assigned to
dreams in the series of cultural analogues is not due to mere chance.
Lest one be surprised at the paradigmatic character of the
interpretation of dreams, it is important to recall the peculiar
affinity between the processes of interpretation and its foremost
illustration. What makes dreams a model can be formulated under the
following points:
1
CARDINAL
. Dreams have a meaning: there are dream-thoughts, and these thoughts
are not basically different from those of waking life. Everything that
places dreams in the same current as the rest of psychical life makes
them capable of being transposed into cultural analogues.
2
CARDINAL
. Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes or desires. This
second
ORDINAL
thesis orients us toward a precise type of interpretation, the
hermeneutics of deciphering. Since desires hide themselves in dreams,
interpretation must substitute the light of meaning for the darkness of
desire. Interpretation is lucidity’s answer to ruse. We touch here upon
the source of any theory of interpretation understood as the reduction
of illusion.
3
CARDINAL
.
Disguise
ORG
is the effect of a work, the dream-work, the mechanisms of which are
far more complicated than might be suggested by a generalization of
scriptural exegesis or even by an investigation of the “genealogy of
morals” in the manner of
Nietzsche
ORG
. Displacement, condensation, pictorial representation,
secondary
ORDINAL
revision, these well-defined procedures open the way to new structural
analogies. If dream interpretation can stand as the paradigm for all
interpretation it is because dreams are in fact the paradigm of all the stratagems of desire.
4
CARDINAL
. The desires or wishes that dreams stand for are necessarily infantile.
Dreams typify the threefold regression of the psychical apparatus: in
the formal sense of a return to images, in the chronological sense of a
return to infancy, and in the topographical sense of a return to the
fusion between desire and pleasure, according to the type of
hallucinatory fulfillment called the primary process. Thus dreams give
us access to a general phenomenon which will repeatedly claim our
attention, the phenomenon of regression; they enable us to grasp the
three
CARDINAL
different forms of this regression.
Henceforward
PERSON
we may characterize analogical interpretation not only as a deciphering
of hidden meanings, as a struggle against masks, but as the revelation
of archaisms of every sort; we shall see the important consequence this
has for the ethical sphere.
5
CARDINAL
. Finally, dreams enable us to elaborate, by means of countless
cross-checks, what could be called the language of desire, that is to
say, an architectonic of the symbolic function in its typical or
universal features. Sexuality, as we know, is what basically sustains
this symbolism; it is preeminently susceptible of symbolization; in it
Darstellbarkeit
GPE
, representability, reaches its highest point. What dreams encounter as a
worn or sedimented language, as symbols in the precise and even narrow
sense
Freud
ORG
gives to the term, is the trace in the individual’s psychism of the
great popular daydreams whose names are folklore and mythology.
The
generalization of the oneiric model should not be regarded, however, as
a monotonous repetition. At the same time its extension to waking life
raises a problem. Each of the traits we have just listed must be
disengaged from the nocturnal peculiarity of dreams in order that dreams
may become, so to speak, the oneiric in general.
1
CARDINAL
. If dreams are to provide us with a general theory of meaning, the
narcissistic expression of the instinctual life during sleep must be
integrated with the manner in which waking life expresses the world.
2
CARDINAL
. If the
Wunscherfiillung
PERSON
of dreams is to have the value of an example, we must, in transposing
it to waking life, overcome the attendant character of sleep or the wish
to sleep which appears to be the nontransposable nucleus of dreams.
Must sleep also be generalized—metaphorically—as a nocturnal factor
immanent to the law of waking life?
3
CARDINAL
. A more crucial difficulty arises from the fact that the procedures by
which the dream-work achieves the distortion of meaning are quite
singular and strange, a characteristic
Freud
ORG
stressed in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
and contrasted with waking thought.
One
CARDINAL
of the tasks of the theory of culture, therefore, will be to extract
from the dream-work a group of structures related to the general
function of “fooling the censorship.” This relation of structure to
function may be seen again in jokes, fairy tales, legends, and myths,
and in some way formalized beyond its occurrence in dreams as such. For
this, however, the notion of regression must be extended beyond its
elementary presentation in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, for the topographical regression toward perception does not appear to
be characteristic of fantasy as a whole. In this respect the
interpretation of culture will from beginning to end be a struggle with
the theme of the “primitive scene” that
Freud
ORG
will always try to connect with real memories, even after he has given up its
first
ORDINAL
expression in the supposed scene of the child’s seduction by the adult.
It seems highly unlikely that a topographic-economic theory of cultural
phenomena can be built on the model of the primary process and the
“hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptual systems.”
4
CARDINAL
. The same difficulty, but in different terms, is raised by the theme of
the infantile nature of dreams. Here the chronological aspect of
regression comes to the fore. How can themes of “progression” be
introduced into an interpretation that
first
ORDINAL
and foremost is attentive to the “retrogressive” march of the physical
apparatus? As we shall see, in order to maintain the universal validity
of the oneiric model
Freud
ORG
refuses as far as possible to oppose progression and regression to each
other. His theory of the superego will never give up the idea that at
bottom man’s fantasies are a restoration of abandoned positions of the
libido, a movement of relapse. In this idea is rooted a certain cultural
pessimism on the part of
Freud
ORG
, which will be reinforced by the discovery of the death instinct.
5
CARDINAL
. The theory of culture will enable us to return to the problem
1
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, p.
90
CARDINAL
and n.
5
CARDINAL
, as well as p.
112
CARDINAL
.
BOOK
11
CARDINAL
. ANALYTIC
of symbolization, which in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
was said to fall outside the dream-work proper.
Freud
ORG
’s reason for turning in that book to the interpretation of myths was
precisely to facilitate the interpretation of symbols that resist the
method of free association. The decoding method at the level of the
individual psychism must give way here to a genetic method at the level
of the history of culture. <
82
CARDINAL
> The genetic point of view had been invoked ever since the
distinction between the primary and secondary processes; the
interpretation of culture will enable us to see how it is connected with
the topographic-economic point of view.
<
82
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, pp.
101
CARDINAL
-02.
For all these reasons the interpretation of culture will be
the great detour that will reveal the dream model in its universal
significance. Dreams will prove to be something quite other than a mere
curiosity of nocturnal life or a means of getting at neurotic conflicts.
Dreams are the royal road to psychoanalysis. <
83
CARDINAL
> Their function as a model stems from the fact that they reveal all
that is nocturnal in man, the nocturnal of his waking life as well as of
his sleep. Man is a being capable of realizing his desires and wishes
in the mode of disguise, regression, and stereotyped symbolization. In
and through man desires advance masked.
Psychoanalysis
PERSON
is of value insofar as art, morality, and religion are analogous
figures or variants of the oneiric mask. The entire drama of dreams is
thus found to be generalized to the dimensions of a universal poetics.
<
83>
TIME
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
,
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
613
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
608
CARDINAL
: “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
This is not a betrayal of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
’s method but rather an expansion and deepening of it, for the “disguise” theme, central to the
Traumdeutung
GPE
, has itself been deepened and expanded into all the areas where
instincts thrust their representatives and derivatives. Among these
masks of desire, analogous to our
night
TIME
dreams, we shall encounter the idols that encumber our false cults.
“Idols as the daydreams of mankind”—such might be the subtitle of the
hermeneutics of culture.
A
first
ORDINAL
confrontation, which does not yet explicitly raise the formidable difficulties attaching to the notion of the superego, will
throw light upon the original style of applied psychoanalysis: the work of art will be the
first
ORDINAL
figure of the daytime nocturnal, the
first
ORDINAL
analogue of the oneiric; it will also place us on the path to the
sublime and to illusion, themes to be explored in the following
chapters.
THE ANALOGY OF THE WORK OF ART
ORG
Freud
ORG
’s application of the topographic-economic point of view to works of art serves
more than one
CARDINAL
design. It was a diversion for the clinician, who was also a great
traveller, collector, and avid bibliophile, a great reader of classical
literature—from
Sophocles
ORG
to
Shakespeare
PERSON
,
Goethe
PERSON
, and contemporary poetry—and a student of ethnography and the history
of religions. For the apologist of his own doctrine—especially during
the period of isolation that preceded the
first
ORDINAL
world war—it was a
Defense
ORG
and an
Illustration of Psychoanalysis
ORG
open to the general, nonscientific public. It was even more a proof and
test of truth for the theoretician of the metapsychology. And last, it
was a milestone in the direction of the great philosophical design that
Freud
ORG
never lost sight of and which was both masked and manifested by the theory of the psychoneuroses.
Because
of the fragmentary character of the essays on psychoanalytic
esthetics—a fact we shall admit and even insist upon in our defense of
those essays—the exact place of esthetics in that great design is not
immediately evident. However, when it is considered that
Freud
ORG
’s sympathy for the arts is equaled only by his severity toward
religious illusion, and that, on the other hand, esthetic seduction or
allurement does not completely measure up to the ideal of veracity and
truth which only science serves without compromise, one may expect to
discover, beneath analyses that seem highly gratuitous, great tensions
which will be brought into the open only at the very end, when esthetic
seduction has found its place among
Love
WORK_OF_ART
, Death, and
Necessity
PERSON
. For
Freud
ORG
, art is the nonobsessional, non-neurotic form of substitute
satisfaction: the charm of esthetic creation does not stem from the
return of the repressed. But where, then, is its place between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle? This important question
will be left in suspense, in the background of the short “papers on
applied psychoanalysis.”
We must
first
ORDINAL
of all correctly understand the systematic but fragmentary character of
Freud
ORG
’s esthetic essays. The systematic point of view is precisely what
imposes and reinforces the fragmentary character. The psychoanalytic
explanation of works of art cannot be compared to a therapeutic or
didactic psychoanalysis, for the simple reason that it does not have the
method of free association at its disposal, nor can it situate its
interpretations in the field of the dual relation between doctor and
patient. In this respect the biographical documents available to art
interpretation are of no more significance than the information
furnished by a
third
ORDINAL
party during a treatment. The psychoanalytic interpretation of art is fragmentary because it is merely analogical.
This is in fact the way
Freud
ORG
himself conceived his essays; they resemble an archeological
reconstruction which, starting from a few architectural details,
sketches out the entire monument by affording them a probable context.
Later we will examine
Freud
ORG
’s general interpretation of cultural productions, but even at this
point we can see that these fragmentary essays are held together by the
systematic unity of his point of view. Thus is explained the peculiar
character of these essays, their amazing minuteness of detail and the
rigorousness—rigidity even—of the theory that coordinates these
fragmentary studies with the great fresco of dreams and the neuroses.
Taken in isolation from one another, each of the studies is neatly
delimited. Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious
ORG
is a brilliant but prudent generalization of the laws of the dream-work
and of fictional satisfaction in the realm of the comic and the
humorous. The interpretation of
Jensen
GPE
’s Gradiva makes no pretension of presenting a general theory of the
novel, but aims rather at rejoining the theory of dreams through the
fictional dreams that a novelist unversed in psychoanalysis attributes
to his hero and through the quasi-analytic cure to which he leads him.
In “
The Moses of Michelangelo
WORK_OF_ART
,” the statue is treated as a singular piece of art, but no general
theory of genius or of artistic creation is proposed. As for
the Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
, it does not, in spite of appearances, go beyond the modest title,
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of His
Childhood
PERSON
; the only things illuminated are a few peculiarities of
Leonardo
GPE
’s artistic destiny, like streaks of light in a painting of a scene in
shadows—streaks of light, empty spaces of light, which may be, as we
shall see, only voiced darkness.
None of these essays go beyond
the simple structural analogy of work to work, of the dream-work to
artistic work, and, so to speak, of vicissitude to vicissitude, of the
vicissitude of instincts to the destiny of the artist.
To explicate this oblique mode of insight I follow in some detail a few of
Freud
ORG
’s analyses. Without limiting myself to a strict historical order, I will begin with the short paper of
1908
DATE
,
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming
ORG
.”
Two
CARDINAL
reasons justify putting it
first
ORDINAL
. In the
first
ORDINAL
place, this short and seemingly insignificant essay is a perfect
illustration of the indirect approach to esthetic phenomena through a
series of increasingly closer comparisons. The creative writer is like a
child at play: “He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very
seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion
[Affektbetrage]—while separating it sharply from reality [Wirklichkeit]”
From play we proceed to fantasy, not through some vague resemblance,
but on the assumption of a necessary connection, namely, that man never
gives anything up, but only exchanges
one
CARDINAL
thing for another by forming substitutes. In this way the adult,
instead of playing, turns to creating fantasies; and fantasies, in their
function as substitutes for play, are daydreams, castles in the air.
This brings us to the threshold of poetry, the middle link being
furnished by the novel, i.e. by art works in narrative form.
Freud
ORG
sees in the fictional history of the novelist’s hero the figure of “
His Majesty the Ego
WORK_OF_ART
”; it is presumed that the other forms of literary creation could be
linked with this prototype through an uninterrupted series of
transitional cases.
Thus the outlines of what might be called the oneiric in general are delineated. In a striking maneuver of abridgment,
Freud
ORG
brings
4
CARDINAL
. “
Der Dichter
PERSON
und das
Phantasieren
PERSON
,”
GW
ORG
,
7
CARDINAL
,
213
CARDINAL
-23;
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming
ORG
,” SE,
9
CARDINAL
,
143
CARDINAL
-53.
6
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
7
CARDINAL
,
220
CARDINAL
; SE,
9
CARDINAL
,
150
CARDINAL
. Cf. “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” GW,
10
CARDINAL
,
157
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
91
CARDINAL
.
together the
two
CARDINAL
ends of the chain of the fantastic—dreams and poetry. Both are
manifestations of the same fate, the fate of unhappy, unsatisfied man:
“The motive force of fantasies [
Phantasien
ORG
] are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.”
Does this mean we are simply to repeat
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
?
Two
CARDINAL
sets of remarks indicate that such is not the case.
First
ORDINAL
, it is no accident that the chain of analogies includes the phenomenon of play; we shall learn in the essay
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
that play implies a mastery over absence, and such mastery is of a
different nature than the mere hallucinatory fulfillment of desires.
Nor,
secondly
ORDINAL
, is the comparison with daydreams devoid of significance; in daydreams
fantasies bear a “date-mark” (Zeit-marke) which pure unconscious
thoughts, being timeless, do not have. Unlike pure unconscious
fantasying, imaginative activity has the power of stringing together the
present of a current impression, the past of infancy, and the future of
a situation to be realized. Later on we shall pursue the connection
between these
two
CARDINAL
sets of remarks.
On the other hand, this short study contains in
its closing paragraph an important suggestion which takes us back from
the fragmentary aspect to the systematic aim. Not being able to
penetrate into the innermost dynamism of artistic creation, we might at
least be able to say something about the relation between the pleasure
it gives rise to and the technique it employs. If dreams are a work, it
is only natural that psychoanalysis approaches the work of art from its
“artisanal” side, in order to disclose, with the help of a structural
analogy, a far more important functional analogy. Thus the investigation
must be oriented toward overcoming resistances. The broadest aim of a
work of art is to enable us to enjoy our own fantasies without
self-reproach or shame.
Two
CARDINAL
procedures are alleged to serve that intention: the creative writer
softens the egoism of daydreams by appropriate alterations and
disguises, and he bribes or allures us by a yield of purely formal
pleasure attached to the presentation of his fantasies. “We give the
name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure
such as this, which is
offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources.”
This
sweeping conception of esthetic pleasure as the detonator of profound
discharges constitutes the most daring insight of the entire
psychoanalytic esthetics. The connection between artistic technique and
its hedonistic effect can be used by
Freud
ORG
and his school as a clue in the most penetrating investigations. It
meets the conditions of modesty and coherence required of an analytic
interpretation. Instead of raising the immense problem of creativity,
one explores the limited problem of the relations between the
pleasurable effect and the technique employed in producing the work of
art. This reasonable question remains within the restricted competence
of an economics of desire.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (
1905
DATE
),
Freud
ORG
outlines a few precise steps leading to the economic theory of
forepleasure. What this brilliant and meticulous essay sets before us is
not a theory of art as a whole, but the study of a precise phenomenon, a
precise pleasurable effect, pinpointed by the discharge of laughter.
Within these narrow limits, however, the analysis goes very deep.
Starting with a study of the verbal techniques of
Witz
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
finds therein the essential aspects of the dream-work: condensation,
displacement, representation by the opposite, etc., thus verifying the
repeatedly postulated reciprocity between work, which is subject to an
economics, and rhetoric, which admits of interpretation. But while
Witz
PERSON
verifies the linguistic interpretation of the dream-work, dreams in
turn furnish the lineaments of an economic theory of the comic and of
humor. This is where
Freud
ORG
extends and goes beyond the work of
Theodor Lipps
PERSON
(Komik und
Humor
GPE
,
1898
DATE
). But above all, this is where we encounter the enigma of forepleasure.
Witz
PERSON
is open to analysis in the proper sense, that is, a separating process
that isolates the slight pleasure caused by mere verbal technique from
the deeper pleasure set in motion by the technical pleasure and which
the play of obscene, aggressive, or cynical words brings to the fore.
The connection between technical and instinctual pleasure constitutes
the core of
Freudian
NORP
esthetics
8
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
223
CARDINAL
; SE,
9
CARDINAL
,
153
CARDINAL
.
and relates that esthetics to the economics of instincts and
pleasure. Assuming that pleasure is connected with a reduction of
tension, the pleasure arising from technique is minimal and is connected
with the economy in psychical expenditure realized by condensation,
displacement, etc. For example, pleasure in nonsense frees us from the
restrictions that logic imposes on our thinking and makes the yoke of
the intellectual disciplines easier to bear. But although this pleasure
is slight, as is the economy in expenditure to which it gives
expression, it has the noteworthy power of contributing, in the form of a
bonus, to erotic, aggressive, and cynical tendencies.
Freud
ORG
here makes use of a theory of
Fechner
ORG
’s concerning the “assistance” or convergence of pleasures and
integrates it with a scheme of functional release that stems more from
Hughlings Jackson
PERSON
than from
Fechner
ORG
. <
84>
TIME
<
84
CARDINAL
>
Der Witz
PERSON
und seine
Beziehung zum Unbewussten (
ORG
1905
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
6
DATE
,
5354
DATE
;
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
ORG
,
SE
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
136
CARDINAL
-
38
DATE
.
This link between the technique of a work of art and the
production of a pleasurable effect is the thread that serves both as
guide and as the element giving rigor to the psychoanalytic esthetics.
One
CARDINAL
could even classify the esthetic essays according to their greater or lesser conformity to the model of the interpretation of
Jokes
PERSON
. “
The Moses of Michelangelo
WORK_OF_ART
” would be the leading example of the
first
ORDINAL
group,
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
the leading example of the
second
ORDINAL
. (We shall see that what at
first
ORDINAL
perplexes us in the
Leonardo
GPE
study is perhaps also what will subsequently be most thought-provoking
regarding the true analytic explanation in the field of art as well as
in other fields.)
A striking feature of
“The Moses of Michelangelo”
WORK_OF_ART
<
85
CARDINAL
> is that the interpretation of the masterpiece is constructed from
details, as in the interpretation of a dream. This properly analytic
method enables
one
CARDINAL
to superpose dream-work and creative work, dream interpretation and art
interpretation. Instead of seeking to explain in a sweeping
generalization the nature of the satisfaction works of art give rise
to—a task in which too many psychoanalysts have become lost—the analysis
attempts to resolve the general enigma of esthetics by taking the
roundabout path of focusing on
one
CARDINAL
outstanding work and the meanings created by it. The patience and
minuteness of this interpretation are well known. Here, just as in a
dream analysis, what counts is the precise and to all appearances minor
fact, and not the impression of the whole: the position of the index
finger of the prophet’s right hand, the sole finger to have effective
contact with the flow of the beard, whereas the rest of the hand is
withdrawn; the tilted position of the tablets about to slip from the
pressure of the arm. From the details of this split-
second
ORDINAL
posture, frozen as it were in stone, the interpretation reconstructs
the chain of conflicting movements that have found in this arrested
movement a sort of unstable compromise. In a gesture of wrath,
Moses
PERSON
is thought to have
first
ORDINAL
raised his hand to his beard, at the risk of letting the tablets fall,
while at the same time his glance was violently drawn toward the
spectacle of the idolatrous people. But a counter movement, canceling
the
first
ORDINAL
and incited by the lively consciousness of his religious mission, is
supposed to have pulled his hand back. What we have before our eyes is
the residue of a movement which has taken place and which the analyst
sets out to reconstruct, just as he reconstructs the opposed ideas that
give rise to compromise formations in dreams, neuroses, slips of the
tongue, and jokes. Digging still deeper beneath this compromise
formation,
Freud
ORG
discovers several layers in the thickness of the apparent meaning.
Beyond the exemplary expression of a conflict that has been overcome, an
artistic expression worthy of guarding the tomb of the Pope, the
analyst also discerns a secret reproach against the violence of the dead
pontiff and, further still, a warning the artist addresses to himself.
<
85
CARDINAL
>
“Der Moses des Michelangelo”
WORK_OF_ART
(
1914
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
172
CARDINAL
-201; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
211
CARDINAL
-36.
With this last trait, “
The Moses of Michelangelo
WORK_OF_ART
” breaks through the limits of a mere applied psychoanalysis. The essay
does not restrict itself to verifying the analytic method; it points to a
type of overdetermination that will be seen more clearly in the
Leonardo
GPE
, in spite of or because of the misunderstandings the
Leonardo
GPE
seems to engender. This overdetermination of the symbol embodied in the
statuary indicates that analysis does not close explanation off, but
rather opens it to a whole density of meaning.
The “Moses” of
LAW
Michelangelo
PERSON
says more than meets the eye; its overdetermination concerns
Moses
PERSON
, the dead
Pope
PERSON
,
Michelangelo
PERSON
—and perhaps
Freud
ORG
himself in his ambiguous relationship to
Moses
ORG
. An endless commentary opens up, which, far from reducing the enigma,
multiplies it. Is this not an admission that the psychoanalysis of art
is essentially interminable?
I now come to the
Leonardo
GPE
. Why did I begin by calling it an occasion and source of
misunderstanding? For the simple reason that this essay, profuse and
brilliant, seems to encourage the wrong sort of psychoanalysis of
art—biographical psychoanalysis. Did not
Freud
ORG
attempt to capture the mechanism of esthetic creation in general, in
its relation to sexual inhibitions or perversions on the one hand and to
the sublimation of the libido into curiosity and scientific research on
the other? Did he not reconstruct, on the sole basis of his
interpretation of the vulture fantasy—which was not, incidentally, a
vulture!—the riddle of
Mona Lisa
PRODUCT
’s smile? Does he not say that the memory of the lost mother and of her
excessive kisses is transformed into the fantasy of the vulture’s tail
in the infant’s mouth, into the homosexual attitude of the artist, and
into the unfathomable smile of
Mona Lisa
PERSON
? “It was his mother who possessed the mysterious smile—the smile that
he had lost and that had fascinated him so much when he found it again
in the
Florentine
ORG
lady.” <86><87> The same smile is repeated in the
two
CARDINAL
mother images in
the “Saint Anne”
EVENT
grouping: “For if the
Gioconda
PRODUCT
’s smile called up in his mind the memory of his mother, it is easy to
understand how it drove him at once to create a glorification of
motherhood, and to give back to his mother the smile he had found in the
noble lady.” <
88
DATE
> And further: “The picture contains the synthesis of the history of
his childhood: its details are to be explained by reference to the most
personal impressions in
Leonardo
GPE
’s life.” <89>
DATE
<
86
DATE
>
Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
(
1910
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
128—211
CARDINAL
;
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of His
Childhood
PERSON
,
SE
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
, 63—
137
MONEY
.
<
87
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
183
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
111
CARDINAL
.
<
88
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
183
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
111-12
CARDINAL
.
<
89
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
184
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
112
CARDINAL
.
The maternal figure that is further away from the boy—the
grandmother—corresponds to the earlier and true mother, Cate-
rina, in its appearance and in its spatial relation to the boy. The
artist seems to have used the blissful smile of
St. Anne
GPE
to disavow and to cloak the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when
she was forced to give up her son to her better-bom rival, as she had
once given up his father as well.
What renders this analysis suspect—according to the criteria we have taken from the work on
Jokes—is
PERSON
that
Freud
ORG
seems to go far beyond the structural analogies that would be
authorized by an analysis of the technique of composition and enters
into instinctual themes that the painting disavows and conceals. Is this
not the very pretension that fosters bad psychoanalysis—the analysis of
the dead, the analysis of writers and artists?
Let us take a closer look at the matter. In the
first
ORDINAL
place it should be noted that
Freud
ORG
does not actually speak of
Leonardo
GPE
’s creativity, but of his being inhibited by his spirit of research:
“The aim of our work has been to explain the inhibitions in
Leonardo
GPE
’s sexual life and in his artistic activity.” The actual object of the essay’s
first
ORDINAL
chapter is
Leonardo
GPE
’s creative shortcomings, which occasion some of
Freud
ORG
’s most remarkable observations about the relations between knowledge
and desire. Within this limited framework, moreover, the transformation
of the instinct of curiosity is seen as an irreducible vicissitude of
repression. Repression,
Freud
ORG
says, can lead either to the inhibition of curiosity itself, which thus
shares the fate of sexuality (this is the type of neurotic inhibition),
or to obsessions of a sexual coloring in which thinking is itself
sexualized (this is the obsessional type). But
in virtue of a special disposition, the
third
ORDINAL
type, which is the rarest and most perfect, escapes both inhibition of
thought and neurotic compulsive thinking. . . . The libido evades the
fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into
curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research
as a reinforcement. . . . The quality of neurosis is absent; there is
no attachment to the original complexes of infantile sexual research,
and the instinct can operate freely in the service of intellectual
interest. Sexual repression, which has made the in-
16
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
203
CARDINAL
-04; SE,
11
DATE
,
131
CARDINAL
.
stinct so strong through the addition to it of sublimated
libido, is still taken into account by the instinct, in that it avoids
any concern with sexual themes.
It is quite clear that with all
this we have done nothing but describe and classify, and that by calling
the riddle sublimation we only make it the more puzzling.
Freud
ORG
readily admits this in his conclusion. It is all well and good to say
that artistic activity derives from sexual desires, and that these deep
instinctual layers were released by regression to the childhood memory
awakened by his meeting with the
Florentine
ORG
lady: “With the help of the oldest of all his erotic impulses he
enjoyed the triumph of once more conquering the inhibition in his art.”
But this only sketches the outlines of a problem: “Since artistic talent
and capacity are intimately connected with sublimation we must admit
that the nature of the artistic function is also inaccessible to us
along psychoanalytic lines.” And a bit further on: “Even if
psychoanalysis does not throw light on the fact of
Leonardo
GPE
’s artistic power, it at least renders its manifestations and its limitations intelligible to us.”
Within this limited scope
Freud
ORG
proceeds, not to an exhaustive inventory, but to a limited excavation beneath
four
CARDINAL
or
five
CARDINAL
puzzling traits treated as archeological remains. Here the
interpretation of the vulture’s tail—treated precisely as a
remnant—plays the pivotal role. Such an interpretation, seeing that it
cannot be a true psychoanalysis, remains purely analogical. It is
arrived at through a number of converging signs taken from disparate
sources:
first
ORDINAL
, the psychoanalysis of homosexuals with its own series of themes
(erotic relationship to the mother, repression and identification with
the mother, narcissistic object-choice, projection of the narcissistic
object onto an object of the same sex, etc.);
second
ORDINAL
, the sexual theory held by children concerning the maternal penis; and
last, mythological parallels (the phallus of the vulture goddess as seen
in archeology). It is in a purely analogical mode that
Freud
ORG
writes: “The child’s assumption that his mother has a penis is thus the com-
17
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
148
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
80
DATE
.
18
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
207
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
134
CARDINAL
.
19
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
209
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
136
CARDINAL
.
20
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
mon source from which are derived the androgynously-formed mother goddesses such as the
Egyptian
NORP
Mut and the vulture’s ‘coda’ in
Leonardo
GPE
’s childhood fantasy.” <90>
PERSON
<
90
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
167
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
97
DATE
.
Now, what insight does this give us into the work of art itself? This is where a misunderstanding of the meaning of
Freud
ORG
’s Leonardo can be of more help to us than the interpretation of
“The Moses of Michelangelo
WORK_OF_ART
.”
On a
first
ORDINAL
reading we think we have unmasked the smile of
Mona Lisa
PERSON
and disclosed what lies hidden behind it; we have shown the kisses the rejected mother lavished on
Leonardo
GPE
. But let us listen with a more critical ear to this sentence: “It is possible that in these figures
Leonardo
PERSON
denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed over it in
his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his
mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female
natures.” <
91
CARDINAL
> This sentence has the same ring as the one we quoted from the
“Moses” analysis. What is meant here by “denied” and “triumphed over”?
Might the representation that fulfills the boy’s wish be something other
than a mere repetition of the fantasy, an exhibition of desire, a
simple bringing to light of what was hidden? Would interpreting
Mona Lisa’s
PERSON
smile imply something more than simply to show, in the master’s
paintings, the fantasy disclosed by the analysis of the childhood
memory? These questions lead us from an overconfident explanation to a
doubt of a
second
ORDINAL
degree. The analsyis has not led us from the less to the better known. The kisses
Leonardo
GPE
’s mother showered on the boy’s lips are not a reality I could use as a
starting point, a solid ground on which I could construct an
understanding of the work of art; the mother, the father, the boy’s
relations to them, the conflicts, the
first
ORDINAL
love wounds—all these no longer exist except in the mode of a signified
absence. If the artist’s brush recreates the mother’s smile in the
smile of
Mona Lisa
PERSON
, it must be said that the memory of it exists nowhere else but in this smile, itself unreal, of the
Gioconda
PRODUCT
, which is signified only by the presence of the color and pattern of the painting. The
Gioconda
PRODUCT
’s smile undoubtedly takes us back to the “childhood memory of
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
,” but this memory only exists as a symbolizable absence that lies deep beneath
Mona Lisa
PERSON
’s smile. Lost like a memory, the mother’s smile is an empty place
within reality; it is the point where all real traces become lost, where
the abolished confines
one
CARDINAL
to fantasy. It is not therefore a thing that is better known and that
would explain the riddle of the work of art; it is an intended absence
which, far from dissipating the initial riddle, increases it.
<
91
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
189
CARDINAL
(verleugnet und kiinstlerisch uberwunden); SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
117
CARDINAL
-18.
It is precisely here that the doctrine—by which I mean the
“metapsychology”—guards us from the excesses of its own applications. We
never have access, it will be remembered, to instincts as such, but
only to their psychical expressions, their representatives in the form
of ideas and affects. Hence the economics is dependent upon the
deciphering of a text; the balance sheet of instinctual investments or
cathexes is read only through the screen of an exegesis bearing on the
interplay between the signifier and the signified. Works of art are a
prominent form of what
Freud
ORG
himself called the “psychical derivatives” of instinctual
representatives. Properly speaking, they are created derivatives. By
that I mean that the fantasy, which was only a signified absence (the
analysis of the childhood memory points precisely to this absence),
finds expression as an existing work in the storehouse of culture. The
mother and her kisses exist for the
first
ORDINAL
time among works offered to the contemplation of men.
Leonardo
GPE
’s brush does not recreate the memory of the mother, it creates it as a work of art. That is the sense in which
Freud
ORG
could say that “in these figures
Leonardo
PERSON
denied the unhappiness of his erotic life and has triumphed over it in his art.” The work of art is thus both symptom and cure.
These last remarks enable us to anticipate some of the problems we will be concerned with in our dialectical investigation.
1
CARDINAL
. To what extent is psychoanalysis justified in submitting works of art
and dreams to the unitary viewpoint of an economics of instincts when
the former are a durable and, in the strong sense of the term, memorable
creation of
our days
DATE
, whereas the latter are a fleeting and sterile product of our
nights
TIME
? If works of art last and live on, is it not because they enrich the
patrimony of cultural values with new meanings? And if they have this
power, is it not because they proceed from a specific work, the work of
an artisan who embodies meaning in an obdurate matter, communicates this
meaning to a public, and thus opens man to a new self-understanding?
This difference in value is not overlooked by psychoanalysis; analysis
indirectly approaches it through the notion of sublimation. But
sublimation is as much a problem as a solution. <92> In any case,
it may be said that the object of psychoanalysis is not simply to accept
the difference between the sterility of dreams and the creativity of
art but rather to treat it as a difference that poses a problem within a
single problematic of desire. Psychoanalysis thereby rejoins Plato’s
view on the deep-seated unity of poetry and love,
Aristotle
GPE
’s view on the continuity of purgation with purification, and
Goethe
ORG
’s view on demonism.
<
92
CARDINAL
> We reserve the general discussion of sublimation for
Chapter 4
LAW
of
the “Dialectic,”
ORG
where we will also give the reasons for this postponement.
2
CARDINAL
. This common ground between psychoanalysis and a philosophy of creation
may be seen in another point. Works of art are not only socially
valuable; as was seen in the example of
“The Moses of Michelangelo”
WORK_OF_ART
and in that of
Leonardo
GPE
, and as will be strikingly shown in the discussion of
Sophocles’
GPE
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
, they are also creations which, as such, are not simply projections of
the artist’s conflicts, but the sketch of their solution. Dreams look
backward, toward infancy, the past; the work of art goes ahead of the
artist; it is a prospective symbol of his personal synthesis and of
man’s future, rather than a regressive symbol of his unresolved
conflicts. But it is possible that this opposition between regression
and progression is only true as a
first
ORDINAL
approximation. Perhaps it will be necessary to transcend it, in spite
of its apparent force. The work of art sets us on the pathway to new
discoveries concerning the symbolic function and sublimation itself.
Could it be that the true meaning of sublimation is to promote new
meanings by mobilizing old energies initially invested in archaic
figures? This is the direction, it would seem, in which
Freud
ORG
himself invites us to look when he distinguishes sublimation from inhibition and obsession in
Leonardo
GPE
, and when even more strongly he opposes sublimation to repression in the essay “On Narcissism.” <
93
CARDINAL
>
<
93
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, pp.
128-29
CARDINAL
.
But to go beyond this opposition between regression and progression, it is
first
ORDINAL
necessary to have elaborated it and to have carried it to the point where it destroys itself. That will be
one
CARDINAL
of the themes of our “
Dialectic
NORP
.”
3
CARDINAL
. This invitation to deepen psychoanalysis by confronting it with other
and seemingly diametrically opposed points of view gives a hint as to
the true meaning of the limits of psychoanalysis. Those limits are in no
way fixed; they are mobile and they can be transgressed indefinitely.
They are not, properly speaking, rigid boundaries, in the manner of a
closed door on which would be written “thus far and no farther.” A
limit, as Kant has taught us, is not an external boundary but a function
of a theory’s internal validity. Psychoanalysis is limited by what
justifies it, namely, its decision to recognize in the phenomena of
culture only what falls under an economics of desire and resistances. I
must admit that this firmness and rigor makes me prefer
Freud
ORG
to
Jung
PERSON
. With Freud I know where I am and where I am going; with
Jung
PERSON
everything risks being confused: the psychism, the soul, the
archetypes, the sacred. It is precisely this internal limitation of the
Freudian
NORP
problematic that will invite us, in a
first
ORDINAL
phase, to oppose to it another explanatory point of view that would
seem more appropriate to the constitution of cultural objects as such,
and then, in a
second
ORDINAL
phase, to find in psychoanalysis itself the reason for going beyond it. The discussion of
Freud
ORG
’s
Leonardo
GPE
gives a hint of that movement. The explanation in terms of the libido
has led us not to a terminus but to a threshold; interpretation does not
uncover a real thing, not even a psychical thing; the desire to which
interpretation refers us is itself a reference to the series of its
“derivatives” and an indefinite selfsymbolization. This abundance of
symbolism lends itself to investigation by other methods,
phenomenological,
Hegelian
PERSON
, and even theological; the justification for these other approaches and
their relation to psychoanalysis will have to be discovered in the
semantic structure of symbols themselves. The psychoanalyst, it may be
noted in passing, should be prepared for this confrontation by his own
culture, not, of course, in order to learn to set external boundaries to
his own discipline, but in order to enlarge it and find within it the
reasons for ever extending the boundaries that have
already been reached. Psychoanalysis thus invites us to move from a
first
ORDINAL
and purely reductive reading to a
second
ORDINAL
reading of cultural phenomena. The task of that
second
ORDINAL
reading is not so much to unmask the repressed and the agency of
repression in order to show what lies behind the masks, as to set free
the interplay of references between signs: having set out to find the
absent reality signified by desire—the smile of the lost mother—we are
referred back by this very absence to another absence, to the unreal
smile of the
Gio
PERSON
-conda. The only thing that gives a presence to the artist’s fantasies
is the work of art; and the reality thus conferred upon them is the
reality of the work of art itself within a world of culture.
Chapter 2
LAW
: From the
Oneiric
ORG
to
the Sublime
ORG
The sublime refers less to a single problem than to a complex of highly ramified difficulties.
Freud
ORG
speaks not of the sublime but of sublimation, but by this word he
indicates the process by which man, with his desires, effects the ideal,
the supreme, that is to say, the sublime.
1
CARDINAL
.
First
ORDINAL
, the word indicates a certain displacement of the center of gravity of
interpretation from the repressed to that which represses. Because of
this “thematic displacement,” interpretation is unavoidably drawn into
the area of cultural phenomena. The repressing agency makes its
appearance as the psychological expression of a prior social fact, the
phenomenon of authority, which includes a number of constituted
historical figures: the family, the mores of a group, tradition,
explicit or implicit education, political and ecclesiastical power,
penal and, in general, social sanctions. In other words, desire is no
longer by itself; it has its “other,” authority. What is more, it has
always had its other in the repressing agent, an agent internal to
desire itself.
Henceforward
PERSON
it will be even less possible to regard the psychoanalysis of culture
as a mere application of the theory of dreams and the neuroses. Of
course, psychoanalysis remains bound by its previous hypotheses; all
events and situations, including the phenomena of culture, are to be
considered only from the viewpoint of the cost of pleasure and
unpleasure. Culture comes within the scope of psychoanalysis only as it
affects the balance sheet of the individual’s libidinal investments or
cathexes. The question of ideals is very precisely determined in
psychoanalysis by this insertion of the cultural theme into the economic
problematic. But the economic problematic is not left unscarred by this
confrontation; what is called the
second
ORDINAL
topography,
which finds its most remarkable expression in The Ego and the Id (
1923
DATE
), states, at the theoretical level, the profound changes imposed upon interpretation. The
second
ORDINAL
topography expresses the repercussion of the new theme on the earlier problematic. Hence we cannot start from the
second
ORDINAL
topography, but must take it as the point of arrival; it sums up all
the revisions of the metapsychology required by the applications of
psychoanalysis to culture; these revisions, ruled in the beginning by
the
first
ORDINAL
state of the system, have in fact created a new systematic state that is precisely the
second
ORDINAL
topography.
2
CARDINAL
. But the impact of cultural phenomena on the psychoanalytic “theory” is not a direct
one
CARDINAL
; in order to integrate this new material into interpretation,
psychoanalysis has to make extensive use of genetic explanation. The
reason for this is clear: the repressed, as we have said, has no history
(“the unconscious is timeless”); what does is the repressing agency; it
is history: the individual’s history from infancy to adulthood, and
mankind’s history from prehistory to history. Hence the thematic
displacement requires a methodological displacement; interpretation must
now become involved in the construction of a new type of model, genetic
models. Their purpose is to coordinate an ontogenesis and a
phylogenesis within
one
CARDINAL
fundamental history, which could be called the history of desire and
authority. What matters in this history is the way authority affects
desire.
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
is not a book of ethnology, nor is
Group Psychology
ORG
and the Analysis of the
Ego
LAW
a book of social psychology, nor is the history of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex a chapter in child psychology. All these writings are a part of
psychoanalysis, insofar as the genetic method and the ethnological or
psychological documents embodied in that method are but
one
CARDINAL
of the steps in the psychoanalytic interpretation. These genetic models—the formation and dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, the killing of the father and the covenant between the
brothers, etc.—will have to be understood not only as tools meant to
coordinate ontogenesis and phylogenesis, but as instruments of
interpretation meant to subordinate every history—that of mores, of
beliefs, of institutions—to the history of desire in its great debate
with authority. We shall then see that within this debate a more
fundamental debate is formed and mediated, one perceived ever since the
beginning of psychoanalysis but fully formulated only at the end: the
debate between the pleasure-unpleasure principle and the reality
principle. One may presume that the true place of ethnology in
Freud
ORG
’s work will not be easy to determine; the ethnology is a necessary
step, but one that has no meaning of its own. Nor, consequently, will it
be easy to say to what extent psychoanalysis is affected by the
frailty—
PERSON
obsoleteness—of its ethnological hypotheses.
3
CARDINAL
. Thus the thematic and methodological displacements imposed by the
consideration of ethical phenomena (in the broad sense where ethos means
mores or
Sittlichkeit
ORG
, i.e. customs or actual morality) are merely steps leading to a new
formulation of analytic “theory.” We shall have to see how the
second
ORDINAL
topography consolidates these various displacements. Which is more
important in this new expression of the topography, the fact that all
the processes that were clinically described and genetically explained
are reduced to the earlier topographic-economic point of view, or the
transformation of the topography under the pressure of new facts? It is
easy to foresee that sublimation, so far described merely as
one
CARDINAL
of the vicissitudes of instinct, will be the point where all these discussions crystallize.
THE
CLINICAL
ORG
AND DESCRIPTIVE APPROACHES TO INTERPRETATION
We have roughly
characterized the new theme as a thematic shift of attention from the
repressed to the agent of repression. Strictly speaking, this point of
view was never absent; it even dates from the birth of psychoanalysis,
since from its earliest
days
DATE
analysis was understood as a struggle against resistances. Thus, what
we will be dealing with under the heading of “the sublime” is something
that analytical experience has always had to face. The same theme was
prominent in the theory of dreams and the neuroses under the heading of
defense or censorship; thus this was the theme at the origin of the
process of distortion (Entstel-
1
CARDINAL
. Letter
72
CARDINAL
of
October 27, 1897
DATE
, in
The Origins of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
, p.
226
CARDINAL
.
lung). Finally, the entire metapsychology, insofar as it was
organized about the instinctual vicissitude called repression, was less a
theory of the repressed than a theory of the relationship between the
repressed and that which represses.
Still, there are legitimate reasons for speaking of a thematic displacement. The agencies of the
second
ORDINAL
topography are not so much places as roles in a personology. Ego, id,
and superego are variations on the personal pronoun or grammatical
subject; what is involved is the relation of the personal to the
anonymous and the suprapersonal in the individual’s coming-to-be. <
94
CARDINAL
>
<
94
CARDINAL
> The earliest allusion to the later theory of the superego is to be found in the text of
1897
DATE
:
“Multiplicity of Psychical Personalities
WORK_OF_ART
. The fact of identification may perhaps allow of this phrase being taken literally” (
Draft L
ORG
, joined to
Letter
PERSON
61 of
May 2, 1897
DATE
, Origins, p.
199
CARDINAL
).
The question of the ego is not, indeed, the question of
consciousness, for the question of the act of becoming conscious, a
central theme of the
first
ORDINAL
topography, does not exhaust the question of the coming-to-be of the ego. The
two
CARDINAL
questions were never confused by
Freud
ORG
, nor can the
two
CARDINAL
words consciousness and ego be taken as equivalents. Up to now we have
seen the question of the ego stated in a series of polarities:
ego-instincts and sexual instincts (prior to the essay
“On Narcissism”
EVENT
), ego-libido and object-libido (beginning with
“On Narcissism”
WORK_OF_ART
). In the latter theory, which may be called the general libido theory,
the ego is thematized and has become interchangeable with objects; it
thus admits of being loved or hated. In this sense one may speak of an
erotic function of the ego. However, the true problematic of the ego is
not yet determined; it lies beyond the alternative of being loved or
hated and is expressed basically in the alternative of dominating or
being dominated, of being master or slave. This question is not the
question of consciousness. Consciousness, increasingly treated according
to an embryological model, is the seat of all the relations with
exteriority;
Freud
ORG
will say that it is a “surface” phenomenon. Consciousness is being-for-the-outside; this was already apparent in
the “Project,
ORG
” where consciousness has to do with the testing of the indications of
reality. Of course, the process of becoming conscious is something quite
different; but
Freud
ORG
always tried to understand this process as
a variety of perception—on the model, therefore, of a surface phenomenon; for
Freud
ORG
, internal perception is the analogue of external perception; that is
why he speaks, in generalizing, of consciousness-perception (Cs.-Pcpt.).
All the modalities of consciousness— temporal organization,
concatenation of energy, and so on—which in the paper on “The
Unconscious” are opposed to the characteristics of the unconscious, stem
from its function as a surface. The network of the functions of
consciousness constitutes, in
Freud
ORG
’s works, the sketch of a true transcendental esthetic, perfectly comparable to
Kant
PERSON
’s, inasmuch as it groups together all the conditions of “exteriority.”
The
question of the ego, i.e. of domination, is completely different. This
question may be introduced by the theme of danger or threat, the primary
phenomenon of nonmastery. The ego finds itself threatened, and in order
to defend itself must dominate the situation. From the outset
Freud
ORG
had noted that it is easier to defend oneself against an external
danger than against an internal danger; from the former there is often
the possibility of flight, and perception itself may be interpreted as a
screen or, better, as a barrier against excitations from without. Man
is essentially a being threatened from within; hence to external dangers
must be added the menace of the instincts (the source of anxiety) and
the menace of conscience (the source of guilt). This threefold danger
and threefold fear constitute the problematic that gives rise to the
second
ORDINAL
topography. Like
Spinoza
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
approaches the ego through its initial situation of slavery, i.e. of nonmastery. Thus he also rejoins the
Marxist
NORP
concept of alienation and the
Nietzschean
NORP
concept of weakness. The ego is primarily that which is weak in the
face of menace. The famous description given in The Ego and the Id (Ch.
5
CARDINAL
) of the “poor creature” menaced by
three
CARDINAL
masters, reality, the libido, and conscience, is well known. The
distinction we make between the process of becoming conscious and the
coming-to-be of the ego is undoubtedly too schematic; the
two
CARDINAL
processes of vigilance and domination can only be distinguished by
abstraction. This is all the more true inasmuch as certain traits
attributed to consciousness in the
first
ORDINAL
topography are now assigned to the ego, just as traits attributed to
the unconscious are now attributed to the id, although the unconscious
and the id do not coincide, since “large portions of the ego and
superego are unconscious.” However, it is well to hold onto this guide:
to be oneself is to maintain
one
CARDINAL
’s role, to be master of
one
CARDINAL
’s acts, to dominate. The neurotic is essentially one who is not “master
in his own house,” as we are told in an essay we shall refer to later, “
A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
.”
However, this is not what is most remarkable and, at
first
ORDINAL
view, most disconcerting: it is not only the neurotic who is not his
own master, but also and above all the man of morality, the ethical man.
The value of all the psychoanalytic investigations concerning the moral
phenomenon stems from the fact that man’s relation to obligation is
first
ORDINAL
described in a situation of weakness, of nondomination. There is obviously a striking affinity here between
Freud
ORG
and
Nietzsche
ORG
.
This condition of weakness, menace, and fear was transcribed by
Freud
ORG
into the relationship of the ego to the superego.
Let us begin with
Freud
ORG
’s terminology. In the
third
ORDINAL
chapter of The Ego and the Id,
Freud
ORG
speaks of “the ego ideal or superego.” Are these terms synonymous? Not
exactly. The difference is in fact twofold: whereas the ego ideal
designates a descriptive aspect, a manifestation in which the superego
is deciphered, the superego is not a descriptive concept but a
construct, an entity on a par with the topographic and economic concepts
we considered in Part I; hence we shall leave the question of the
superego for later and begin with a consideration of the ego ideal. What
complicates things, however, is that not only are the concepts of ego
ideal and superego on different epistemological levels, but at their
respective levels they do not even have the same extension. In the New
Introductory Lectures, where
Freud
ORG
put the greatest order into his terminology, the ego ideal is regarded merely as the
third
ORDINAL
function of the superego, along with self-observation and “conscience”
(Gewis-sen). This fluctuation in terminology is not surprising: in
addition to the fact that these concepts all have an exploratory
character, the
3
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
75
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
69
CARDINAL
.
4
CARDINAL
. See below, “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
2
CARDINAL
, pp.
426—27
CARDINAL
.
5
CARDINAL
. “But let us return to the superego. We have allotted it the functions of self-observation, of conscience [das
Gewissen
PERSON
] and of [maintaining] the ideal [das IdealfunktionT {
GW
PERSON
,
15
CARDINAL
,
72
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
66
CARDINAL
).
procedure of psychoanalysis implies that they remain approximate.
One
CARDINAL
reason for this is that they do not designate any primal function. For
psychoanalysis, there is no intelligibility peculiar to the ethical
phenomenon; to understand the birth of the superego is simply to
understand the superego; it is what it has become. Hence we cannot go
very far in describing the functions of the superego without appealing
to the history of their constitution; what will lead us to a genetic
explanation is in fact a certain inconsistency in description. A
second
ORDINAL
reason is that the phenomena to be described necessarily present
themselves in a random fashion; what unifies them—the superego—is not a
reality subject to description, but rather a theoretical concept. In
description, the phenomena are highly disparate and even opposed to one
another; the theoretical concept unites them and even identifies them
with each other. The
third
ORDINAL
and final reason is that several of the phenomena we are going to
consider are themselves the result of interpretation. Resistance, for
example, is not a simple phenomenon; it is revealed by the absence of
ideas, by amnesia, as well as by flight to another theme, or by the
production of painful sensations; thus resistance, like the repressed,
is arrived at through inference. The same goes for the “unconscious
sense of guilt,” which is by no means a phenomenal but rather an
inferred reality (I do not dispute here the legitimacy of this
expression, which
Freud
ORG
himself questions).
Freud
ORG
places the origin of the theory of the superego in the discovery of the
resistance to becoming conscious and in the discovery of the sense of
guilt, both of which were encountered in analysis as obstacles to
treatment.
Having made these reservations, let us consider the
three
CARDINAL
functions of the superego enumerated in the New Introductory Lectures:
self-observation, conscience, and the formation of an ideal.
By self-observation
Freud
ORG
designates a certain splitting of the ego, experienced as the feeling
of being observed, watched, criticized, condemned: the superego reveals
itself as a watchful gaze.
6
CARDINAL
. Concerning the right of speaking about unconscious feelings, cf. “The
Unconscious,” Section III. We discussed the problem above, pp.
145
CARDINAL
-46. The expression “unconscious sense of guilt” occurs very early (
“Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices
ORG
,”
GW
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
135
CARDINAL
; SE,
9
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
); it reappears in The Ego and the Id at the end of Ch.
2
CARDINAL
and is discussed at some length in
Ch
GPE
.
5
CARDINAL
in the context of the death instinct.
Conscience
ORG
, on the other hand, designates the severity and cruelty of the
superego; conscience objects to certain actions, like Socrates’ demon
which says “No,” and punishes with reproaches once the action has been
taken. Thus the ego is not only watched but ill-treated by its inner and
superior other. It scarcely needs emphasizing that these
two
CARDINAL
characteristics of observing and condemning derive not from a
Kantian
NORP
type of reflection upon the condition of the good will, upon the a
priori structure of obligation, but from clinical observation. The split
between the observing agency and the rest of the ego is revealed,
greatly magnified, in the delusions patients have of being observed, and
the cruelty of the superego is manifested in the pathology of
melancholia.
The ideal-function of the superego is described as
follows: the superego “is also the vehicle of the ego ideal by which the
ego measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever
greater perfection it strives to fulfill.” At
first
ORDINAL
view, it would seem that this analysis is not patterned on pathology.
For is it not a question here of moral aspiration, as desire to emulate a
model, to measure oneself by it, to alter
one
CARDINAL
’s ego according to it? The above text allows this interpretation. However,
Freud
ORG
is more attentive to the forced aspect of the response given by the ego
to the demands of the superego than to the spontaneity of that
response; he is concerned more with the ego’s submission than with its
striving. Moreover, when placed next to the
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
characteristics, this
third
ORDINAL
function takes on a coloring which may well be said to be pathological, in the clinical and the
Kantian
NORP
sense of the word. Kant spoke of the pathology of desire;
Freud
ORG
speaks of the pathology of duty, in the
three
CARDINAL
modes of observation, condemnation, and idealization.
Will such
an analysis be rejected because it views conscience not as a primal
given but as something to be deciphered through the screen of the
clinical? The advantage of the
Freudian
NORP
“prejudice” is that it begins without taking anything for granted: by
treating moral reality as an a posteriori reality, constituted and
sedimented,
Freud
ORG
’s analysis avoids the laziness that is part of any appeal to the a
priori. As for the clinical approach, it enables us, by means of
analogy, to denounce the inauthenticity of the ordinary conscience. The
approach through pathology reveals the initially alienated and
7
CARDINAL
. New Introductory Lectures,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
71
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
64
CARDINAL
-65.
alienating situation of morality; a pathology of duty is
just as instructive as a pathology of desire: ultimately, the former is
merely the prolongation of the latter. The ego oppressed by the superego
is in a situation, with respect to this internal foreigner, analogous
to that of the ego confronted by the pressure of its own desires;
because of the superego we are “foreign” to ourselves: thus
Freud
ORG
speaks of the superego as an “internal foreign territory.” This hidden
affinity between desire and the sublime—in topographical language,
between the id and the superego—is what the genetic interpretation will
try to explain and the economics of ideals to systematize.
We
must not, of course, demand from psychoanalysis what it cannot give:
namely, the origin of the ethical problem, i.e. its ground and
principle; but it can give its source and genesis. The difficult problem
of identification has its roots here. The question is this: How can I,
by starting from another—say, from the father— become myself? Thought
that begins by rejecting the primordial givenness of the ethical ego has
the advantage of placing the whole focus of attention on the process of
the internalization of the external.
Thereby
ORG
is revealed not only an affinity with
Nietzsche
ORG
, but also the possibility of a confrontation with
Hegel
PERSON
and his concept of the reduplication of consciousness whereby
consciousness becomes self-consciousness. Of course, by rejecting the
primordial givenness of the ethical phenomenon,
Freud
ORG
can encounter morality only as a wounding of desire, as interdiction
and not as aspiration. But the limitation of his point of view has its
counterpart in coherence: if the ethical phenomenon is
first
ORDINAL
given in a wounding of desire, it is open to a general erotic theory, and the ego, exposed to its
three
CARDINAL
masters, remains subject to an interpretation involving an economics.
THE GENETIC WAYS OF INTERPRETATION
ORG
“Since [the superego] goes back to the influence of parents, educators, and so on, we learn still more of
8
CARDINAL
. Ibid.,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
62
DATE
(inneres
Ausland
GPE
);
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
57
CARDINAL
.
its significance if we turn to those who are its sources.”
This statement from the New Introductory Lectures aptly expresses the
function of genetic explanation in a system that acknowledges neither
the primordial givenness nor the ethical dimension of the
Cogito
PERSON
; here genesis takes the place of ground.
There is no contesting of the fact that
Freudianism
ORG
, in its basic intention, is not just a variety of evolutionism or moral
geneticism. However, a study of the texts bears out the assertion that
psychoanalysis, having made a dogmatic beginning, renders its own
explanation increasingly problematic in proportion as it puts it to use.
For
one
CARDINAL
thing, the proposed genesis does not constitute an exhaustive
explanation. The genetic explanation reveals a source of authority—the
parents—that merely transmits a prior force of constraint and
aspiration; the text we have just cited continues as follows: “a child’s
superego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of
its parents’ superego; the contents which fill it are the same and it
becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments
of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from
generation to generation.” There is no question, therefore, of looking
to the genetic explanation for a justification of the obligatory or of
the acceptable as such; these are given in the world of culture. The
explanation simply delimits the earliest phenomenon of authority without
truly exhausting it. In this sense, the genesis of morality according
to
Freudian
NORP
psychoanalysis is actually a paragenesis. Because of its infinite
complexity, the genesis falls back on an economic explanation of the
superego as an agency belonging to the same system as the id. The
question is whether the economic explanation will completely cover the
problem inherited from the individual and collective history of the
superego.
Secondly
ORDINAL
, we must not expect too much from the genetic explanation. Even when
reduced to a role of intermediary between clinical description and
economic explanation, the genesis proves to be surprisingly complex and
ultimately disappointing. Is it a psycho-
9
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
72
CARDINAL
-73; SE,
22
DATE
,
67
CARDINAL
.
10
CARDINAL
. Cf. below, “
Problematic
WORK_OF_ART
,” pp.
44-46
DATE
.
11
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
72
CARDINAL
-73; SE,
22
DATE
,
67
CARDINAL
.
logical explanation? Yes, if one considers that the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is the decisive crisis from which arises, by virtue of the
well-known mechanism of identification, each individual’s structure as a
personal ego. But this ontogenesis of the superego—besides leaving
untouched the problem of the obligatory as such—makes an appeal on its
own historical plane to a sociological explanation: the
Oedipus
LOC
complex involves the family and in general the social phenomenon of authority. Thus
Freud
ORG
is led from ontogenesis to phylogenesis, hoping to find in the
institution of the prohibition of incest and in institutions generally
the sociological counterpart of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex. But, as an examination of
Totem and Taboo
ORG
will make quite evident, psychoanalysis is condemned to have recourse
to an ethnology that is fanciful, at times fantastic, and in any event
always secondhand; in the end, analysis psychologizes the social
phenomenon. Just when it looks to social phenomena for the missing proof
of the derived character of the superego, it is reduced to working out a
psychological explanation of taboo, thus cutting off the branch on
which it placed its credentials. This is a further reason for switching
from an infinite genesis to an economic explanation. As may be seen, a
number of surprises and deceptions await us on this roundabout path
through the genetic explanation. Let us try, then, to retrace this
movement from ontogenesis to phylogenesis and back again.
Every reader of
Freud
ORG
’s early writings is struck by the decisive manner in which the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex was discovered; in one stroke it was revealed both as an
individual drama and as the collective fate of mankind, as a
psychological fact and as the source of morality, as the origin of
neurosis and as the origin of civilization.
Individual, personal, intimate, the
Oedipus
LOC
complex gets its “secret” character from the fact that
Freud
ORG
discovered it in his selfanalysis; at the same time, its universality
is seen in the details of that singular experience. To begin with, the
Oedipus situation immediately takes its place in the etiology of the
neuroses, for it replaces an earlier hypothesis of which it is the
reverse. We recall the faith
Freud
ORG
had in the theory of the child’s seduction by the adult, a theory
suggested by the accounts of that scene which his patients related to
him during analysis. The
Oedipus
LOC
complex is the theory of seduction in reverse; or rather, the seduction
by the father turns out to be the distorted presentation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex: the father does not seduce the child, but rather the child, in
wishing to possess its mother, desires the death of the father. The
seduction scene must be understood as a “screen memory” of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex; the latter very naturally takes the place of the earlier fantasy.
Placed
within the etiology of the neuroses, it is also located within the
structure of culture: “Another presentiment tells me, as if I knew
already—though I do not know anything at all—that I am about to discover
the source of morality.” The amazing thing about this discovery is that
it is directly accompanied by the conviction that this singular
adventure is also a paradigm of destiny. That is how I interpret the
strict parallel between
Freud
ORG
’s selfanalysis and the interpretation of the
Greek
NORP
myth of
Oedipus
LOC
. Being honest with oneself coincides with grasping a universal drama.
12
CARDINAL
. The letters to Fliess of
1897
DATE
constitute an important document in this connection: whereas previously
“blame was laid on perverse acts by the father” (Letter
69
CARDINAL
), the
Oedipus
LOC
complex now represents “the father’s innocence” and a sexual activity must be assigned to
the early years
DATE
of infancy; the primal scene fantasies were intended to cover up this infantile sexuality; see also “On the History of
the Psychoanalytic Movement”
ORG
(
1914
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
55
CARDINAL
-61; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
17
CARDINAL
-18.
Concerning Freud’s
PERSON
self-analysis and his own
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, see
Letter 69
PERSON
,
70
DATE
,
71
CARDINAL
: the absence of any active role on the part of his father, the pious
and thieving nurse of his childhood (“my instructress in sexual
matters”), sexual curiosity about his mother, jealousy of his brother,
the ambiguous position of his older nephew, etc. On all this see also
Jones
PERSON
, Life and Work,
1
CARDINAL
, Ch.
14
CARDINAL
. In addition, concerning the transfer of the young
Sigmund
GPE
’s affection onto his friend Fliess and of his hostility onto his colleague
Breuer
PERSON
, cf.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
305
CARDINAL
-08;
Anzieu
GPE
, L’Auto-analyse, pp.
59-73
CARDINAL
. The
first
ORDINAL
allusion to the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is to be found in
Draft N
ORG
which accompanies
Letter 64
PERSON
of
May 31, 1897
DATE
. The notion of “screen memories” is treated systematically in
an article of 1899, GW, 1
DATE
,
531-54
DATE
; SE,
3
CARDINAL
,
303
CARDINAL
-22.
13
DATE
.
Letter 64
PERSON
of
May 31, 1897
DATE
, Origins, p.
206
CARDINAL
.
14
CARDINAL
. “Only
one
CARDINAL
idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the
mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it
to be a general phenomenon of early childhood, even if it does not
always occur so early as in children who have been made hysterics.
(Similarly with the ‘romanticization of origins’ in the case of
paranoiacs—
ORG
heroes, founders of religion.) If that is the case, the gripping power of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate that
The relation is reciprocal: self-analysis discloses the “gripping power,” the “compulsion” of the
Greek
NORP
legend; the myth in turn is evidence of the fate—I mean the character
of nonarbitrary destiny —that attaches to the singular experience.
Perhaps in this global insight into the coincidence between singular
experience and universal destiny must be sought the underlying
motivation, which no ethnological inquiry can exhaust, of all
Freud
ORG
’s attempts to relate ontogenesis, the individual secret, with phylogenesis, the universal destiny.
The scope of this universal drama is seen from the outset; it is shown in the extension of the interpretation of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
to the personage of
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
: if “the hysteric
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
” hesitates to kill his mother’s lover, it is because within him lies
“the obscure memory that he himself had meditated the same deed against
his father because of passion for his mother.” <
95><96><97
CARDINAL
> A brilliant and decisive comparison, for if Oedipus reveals the aspect of destiny,
Hamlet
ORG
reveals the aspect of guilt attached to the complex. It is no coincidence that
Freud
ORG
cites
Hamlet
ORG
’s phrase as
early as 1897
DATE
, and again in Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
: “So conscience doth make cowards of us all”; on which
Freud
ORG
comments: “His conscience is his unconscious feeling of guilt.”
the
story presupposes, becomes intelligible, and one can understand why
later fate dramas were such failures. Our feelings rise against any
arbitrary, individual fate such as shown in the
Ahnfrau
PERSON
[the title of a play by
Grillparzer
ORG
], etc., but the
Greek
NORP
myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has
felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was once a
budding
Oedipus
LOC
in fantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes
everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which
separates his infantile from his present state” (Letter
71
CARDINAL
of
October 15, 1897
DATE
, Origins, pp.
223
CARDINAL
-24).
<
96
CARDINAL
>
Letter 71
PERSON
, p.
224
CARDINAL
.
<
97
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
What makes the individual secret a universal—and
ethical—
GPE
destiny, if not the involvement in institutions? The
Oedipus
LOC
complex is incest dreamed; but “incest is anti-social and civilization consists in a progressive renunciation of it.” <
98
CARDINAL
> Thus repression, which belongs to the individual’s history of desire, coincides with
one
CARDINAL
of the most formidable cultural institutions, the prohibition of
incest. The Oedipus situation sets up the great conflict between
civilization and the instincts on which
Freud
ORG
will repeatedly comment from “
‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness”
WORK_OF_ART
(
1908
DATE
) and
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
(
1912-13
DATE
), to
Civilization and Its Discontents
LAW
(
1930
DATE
) and
Why War
EVENT
? (
1933
DATE
). Thus repression and culture, intrapsychical institution and social institution, coincide in this paradigmatic case.
<
98
CARDINAL
>
Draft N
ORG
,
May 31, 1897
DATE
, Origins, p.
210
CARDINAL
.
From this tangle of insights the psychological genesis proceeds in one direction, the sociological genesis in another. The
first
ORDINAL
line is initiated by
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
and
the Three Essays on Sexuality
ORG
, the second by
Totem and Taboo
ORG
.
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
transcribes almost literally the great discoveries of
the preceding years
DATE
, now known to us through
the “Letters to Fliess”
EVENT
; but at the same time the cultural import of those discoveries is concealed. The interpretation of the
Oedipus
LAW
complex is placed among the examples of dreams of the death of loved
relatives, which come under the heading of typical dreams; the latter
appear in the chapter dealing with “
The Material and Sources of Dreams”—prior
WORK_OF_ART
, therefore, to the great chapter on
“The Dream-Work.
WORK_OF_ART
” <
99
CARDINAL
> This arrangement is quite misleading, and even more so the treatment of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex as a mere oneiric theme. The
Greek
NORP
legend merely serves to confirm the “universal validity” of the
hypothesis “put forward in regard to the psychology of children.” <
100
CARDINAL
> Our dreams show that the explanation of the tragedy lies in each of us: “King Oedipus, who slew his father
Lai'us
PERSON
and married his mother
Jocasta
ORG
, merely shows us the fulfillment of our childhood wishes. . . . Here is
one in whom these primeval [urzeitlich] wishes of our childhood have
been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the
repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down
within us.” <
101
CARDINAL
> Thus the great conflict between civilization and instincts is
projected onto the intrapsychical plane and more precisely onto the
screen of dreams: “There is an unmistakable indication in the text of
Sophocles’
GPE
tragedy itself that the legend of Oedipus sprang from some primeval
[uralt] dream-material which had as its content the distressing
disturbance of a child’s relation to his parents owing to the
first
ORDINAL
stirrings of sexuality.”
Jocasta
PERSON
herself explains to Oedipus his own history as a typical and universal dream:
<99>
Cf
PERSON
. our discussion above, pp.
101
CARDINAL
-02 and n.
27
CARDINAL
.
<
101
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
262
CARDINAL
-63.
“Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain With her who bare him. He hath least annoy Who with such omens troubleth not his mind.”
And
Freud
ORG
concludes: “The story of
Oedipus
PERSON
is the reaction of the imagination to these
two
CARDINAL
typical dreams [of possessing
one
CARDINAL
’s mother and of the death of
one
CARDINAL
’s father]. And just as these dreams, when dreamt by adults, are
accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include
horror and self-punishment.”
Why this apparent reduction of the cultural significance of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
? Besides
Freud
ORG
’s skill in this book in distilling the truth and presenting it in a
semi-concealed fashion, I would also mention his concern to avoid
excursions into contingent circumstances of culture, such as his passing
explanation of certain traits of the father-son hostility as a residue
in our middle-class culture of the potestas patris familias of ancient
Rome
GPE
. If one does not wish to limit oneself to a sociocultural explanation,
which is precisely what so many neo-Freudians have done, it is necessary
to go back to the archaic or primeval constitution of sexuality. That
is why
Freud
ORG
here subordinates the institutional aspect of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex to the fantasy aspect and looks for the latter in dreams common
to neurotics and to normal subjects. However, within this context
peculiar to
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
definite emphasis is placed upon the aspect of universal destiny that
the myth alone reveals—what I will call the hyperpsychological and
hypersociological dimension of the myth.
23
CARDINAL
. “All of this is patent to the eyes of everyone. But it does not help
us in our endeavour to explain dreams of a parent’s death in people
whose piety towards their parents has long been unimpeachably
established. Previous discussions, moreover, will have prepared us to
learn that the death-wish against parents dates back to earliest
childhood” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
257
CARDINAL
).
The universal character of the incestuous impulse is
confirmed by the sudden discovery that all men share the destiny of
Oedipus; and that common destiny is in turn confirmed by “the profound
and universal power” of the legend itself. The myth is of course reduced
to a dream fantasy; but this fantasy is universal, for it springs “from
some primeval dream-material.” Therefore, the complex will forever bear
the name of the myth, even when psychoanalysis seems to explain the
myth by the oneiric fantasy; the myth alone is what immediately stamps
the dream as “typical.” <
102
CARDINAL
>
<
102
CARDINAL
> “If
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary
Greek
NORP
one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the
contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the
particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified.
There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to
recognize the compelling force of destiny in the
Oedipus
LOC
. . . His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because
the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
262
CARDINAL
). A few pages later, speaking of
Hamlet
ORG
and
Macbeth
PERSON
,
Freud
PERSON
concludes: “But just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being ‘overinterpreted’ [der
Ueberdeutung
GPE
fcihig] and indeed need to be, if they are fully to be understood, so
all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single
interpretation” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
272
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
266
CARDINAL
). This “overinterpretation” does not seem to me reducible to the
ordinary “overdetermination” through condensation or displacement; the
latter would seem to lead to a single interpretation—precisely the one
that explains the overdetermination. In the
fourth
ORDINAL
chapter of
the “Dialectic
EVENT
” I will try to work out a true “overinterpretation.” We will discover some new aspects of
Freud
ORG
’s text on Sophocles’ Oedipus that fully justify this notion of overinterpretation; cf. below, “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
4
CARDINAL
.
The
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality
ORG
are an important step toward the strictly psychological interpretation of the
Oedipus
LAW
complex. All the later theses concerning the role of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex in the establishment of the superego presuppose the existence
of an infantile sexuality; hence the immense importance of
the Three Essays
ORG
. More precisely, the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
supply the interpretation of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex with
two
CARDINAL
basic themes: that of the structure of infantile sexuality, and that of its history or phases.
More
than this or that particular thesis concerning “the sexual
aberrations,” “infantile sexuality,” or “the transformations of puberty”
(the titles of
the Three Essays
ORG
), what this short book essentially intended to show is the weight of
prehistory in man’s sexual history—a prehistory obliterated, as it were,
by a careful “amnesia,” to which we shall return later. Once the
interdict barring us from access to infantile sexuality has been raised,
great and terrible truths rise up: the objects and aims with which we
are acquainted in an estate of culture are secondary functions of a much
broader tendency capable of every sort of “transgression” and
“perversion.” A disconnected bundle of instincts, including cruelty, is
ever on the verge of coming undone, with the resultant formation of
neurosis as the negative of perversion. Civilization is built up at the
expense of the sexual instincts, through the restriction of their use
and in reaction against the threat of their potential perversity (in
this period,
Freud
ORG
uses the general term sublimation to cover the diversion of sexual
forces from their aims to new aims that are socially useful) . <
103
CARDINAL
>
<
103
CARDINAL
> “Historians of civilization appear to be at
one
CARDINAL
in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of
cultural achievement by this diversion of sexual instinctual forces from
sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process which deserves
the name of ‘sublimation.’ To this we would add, accordingly, that the
same process plays a part in the development of the individual and we
would place its beginning in the period of sexual latency of childhood” (
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
79
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
178
CARDINAL
).
This whole network of ideas is the background for the specific psychology of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex; in fact, there is no discussion of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex which does not sooner or later touch upon the group of themes of
the Three Essays—
ORG
the existence of infantile sexuality, its polymorphous structure, its
disposition to perversion. Infantile incest, presupposed by the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, is only a particular instance of this general theme.
But the interpretation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is also indebted to
the Three Essays for
ORG
the first detailed elaboration of the theme of the “stages” or
“organizations” of the libido, a genetic theme which is the
indispensable complement of the structural theme. It is true that the
differentiation of the stages is not yet carried very far in the
second
ORDINAL
essay. In the edition of
1915
DATE
, the section dealing with the phases of development of sexual organization still recognizes
only two
CARDINAL
“pregenital organizations,” the oral organization and the sadistic-anal
organization; but the fundamental distinction between the sexual and
the genital is established, not only in its structural significance, but
in its historical elaboration; this distinction is the fundamental
condition of all the subsequent analyses. At
a later date
DATE
(
1923
DATE
), and in the following editions of
the Three Essays
ORG
, this distinction will enable
Freud
ORG
to modify his account by relating the
Oedipus
LOC
complex to another pregenital organization, the phallic stage, hence to
a stage posterior to auto-erotism, a stage where the libido already has
a vis-a-vis, but where, in return, sexuality has failed through lack of
organization. To this phallic organization will be related the threat
of castration, with the result that in
1924
DATE
, the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex can be explained both by the threat of castration and by the
lack of organization and maturation of the corresponding stage. All this
is present in germ in the theory of stages in
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
. Even the theme of identification finds support in the theory of
stages, inasmuch as the “prototype” of this identification is the
incorporation or devouring of the oral or cannibalistic stage. <
104
ORG
>
DATE
<
104
ORG
>
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
98
DATE
(
Vorbild
ORG
);
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
198
CARDINAL
(prototype).
It is not difficult to see the importance of this brief book, valued very highly by its author, for the explication of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. It moves in line with
one
CARDINAL
of the most tenacious tendencies of
Freud
ORG
’s thought, namely his insistence on “prehistory,” <
105
CARDINAL
> a theme shared by
Marx
PERSON
and
Freud
PERSON
; a prehistory which has its own laws and, so to speak, its own history.
<
105
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
73
DATE
(Vorzeit);
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
173
CARDINAL
(the primeval period).
This weight of prehistory promotes a type of pessimism which is very characteristic of
Freud
ORG
and which all the varieties of neo-Freudianism have tried to soften or
eliminate. We have already seen it in different forms: the
“indestructibility of wishes
” in The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, the “timelessness” of the unconscious in
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
.” What the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
add to this basic theme is the idea of an original deviation of
sexuality, deviation as to the object, deviation as to the aim: in his
conclusion
Freud
ORG
says that “a disposition to perversions is an original and universal
disposition of the human sexual instinct and . . . normal sexual
behavior is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and
psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.” <
106>
TIME
Thus human sexuality is the seat of a debate analogous to the one the
sophists inaugurated concerning language, the debate between physis and
nomos. Like language, human sexuality is the result of institution as
much as of nature; the theme of perversion, which has sometimes been
looked upon as a carry-over from middle-class morality, is there to
remind us that “by nature” the libido holds in reserve all the
“infractions” of ordinary morality. Genital union is always a victory
over the libido’s original dispersion toward zones, aims, and objects
regarded as deviations from the mainstream of genital heterosexuality.
Perverts and neuropaths are the human evidence of this original
aberration of human sexuality. Fixation and regression to earlier stages
are specifically human possibilities inscribed in the structure and
history of this “prehistory.”
<
106
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
132
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
231
CARDINAL
.
Hence, institutionalization is necessarily painful: man is
educated only by “renouncing” archaic practices, by “abandoning” former
objects and aims; institutionalization is the counterpart of that
“polymorphously perverse” structure. Because the adult remains subject
to the infant he once was, because he can lag behind and regress,
because he is capable of archaism, conflict is no mere accident which he
might be spared by a better social organization or a more suitable
education; human beings can experience entry into culture only in the
mode of conflict. Suffering accompanies the task of culture like fate,
the fate illustrated by the Oedipus tragedy. Possibility of aberration
and necessity of repression are correlative; <
107><108
CARDINAL
> cultural renunciation, similar to the work of mourning mentioned above, holds the place occupied by fear in the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic of
Master and Slave
ORG
; identification with the father will enable us shortly to pursue this comparison with the
Hegelian
NORP
notion of recognition. The discovery of the death instinct is already in
the Three Essays
ORG
; the many allusions to cruelty will allow us to pursue further the comparison between
Hegel
GPE
and
Freud
GPE
. This is the somber background against which the Oedipus episode unfolds.
<
107>
TIME
In the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
the expression “mental dams” is frequently encountered (
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
177
CARDINAL
,
232
CARDINAL
). This notion does not conflict with the mechanism in question;
three
CARDINAL
“developments” (
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
138
CARDINAL
-41;
SE
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
237
CARDINAL
-39) are considered: the
first
ORDINAL
leads to perversion, which results from the failure of the genital zone to dominate the other aims and zones; the
second
ORDINAL
leads to neurosis, when the sexual instinct undergoes repression and continues its existence underground; the
third
ORDINAL
leads to sublimation, when the tendency finds an outlet and use in
other fields: “Here we have one of the origins of artistic activity;
and, according to the completeness or incompleteness of the sublimation,
a characterological analysis of a highly gifted individual, and in
particular of one with an artistic disposition, may reveal a mixture, in
every proportion, of efficiency [Leistungsfdhigkeit] perversion and
neurosis”
(GW, 5, 140
WORK_OF_ART
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
238
CARDINAL
). Repression, sublimation, and reaction-formation (treated here as a subspecies of sublimation—cf. “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
3
CARDINAL
), are
three
CARDINAL
fairly close mechanisms and come together in what we call a person’s character (ibid.).
Why is this crisis more important than the others, so important that
Freud
ORG
would almost have it be the sole pathway to neurosis and culture alike? <
109
CARDINAL
> Against this apparent aggrandizement of the Oedipus incident, one
might legitimately object that all transitions —both in the order of
aims and in the order of objects—are crises and renunciations and that
the Oedipus drama is but a segment in the general drama which
Freud
ORG
calls “the finding of an object” <
110>
TIME
and which, from nursing to weaning, together with the experience of the
absence of loved objects, is simply a long history of the “choosing of
objects” and the “giving up of objects,” of elections and deceptions;
the barrier against incest is, after all, merely one of the ways of
checking desire, and one that is quite comparable to the other ways
(weaning, absence, withdrawal of affection). However, what gives the
prohibition of incest a unique position in this rude schooling of
desire, and more particularly in the education in object-choice, is
precisely its cultural dimension. The
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
put this very clearly:
(
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
140
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
238
CARDINAL
). Repression, sublimation, and reaction-formation (treated here as a subspecies of sublimation—cf. “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
3
CARDINAL
), are
three
CARDINAL
fairly close mechanisms and come together in what we call a person’s character (ibid.).
<
110
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
ff.; SE,
7
CARDINAL
,
222
CARDINAL
ff.
Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand
made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the
interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units
31
DATE
. A footnote added in
1920
DATE
is very explicit: “It has justly been said that the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex is the nuclear complex [
Kernkomplex
ORG
] of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content.
It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its
after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of
adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of
mastering the
Oedipus
LOC
complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the
progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has
become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psychoanalysis
from its opponents” (
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
-28; SE,
may be swallowed up by the family; and for this reason,
in the case of every individual, but in particular of adolescent boys,
it seeks by all possible means to loosen their connection with their
family—a connection which, in their childhood, is the only important
one
CARDINAL
.
In this text, the horror of incest is seen as an attainment of
civilization which every new individual must appropriate to himself if
it has not already been fixed by heredity; the explanation of its origin
is switched, therefore, from psychology to ethnology.
Does phylogeny take us any further than ontogeny?
That is what an examination of
Totem
GPE
and
Taboo
ORG
will enable us to determine. As far as possible we shall put aside the
definite problem of the origin of religious belief, that is, belief in
the existence of gods, which
Freud
ORG
derives, as we know, from the totemic institution. It will of course be
impossible to separate taboo from totem for very long, for it is
precisely
Freud
ORG
’s thesis that moral prohibitions are derived from primitive taboo
prohibitions and that the latter are grounded in the totemic kinship,
itself interpreted as a historical and collective
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex. Nevertheless it is legitimate to make as thorough an
investigation of the book as possible without bringing in its weakest
point, namely, the historical
Oedipus
LOC
complex of primitive peoples, which is perhaps merely a scientific myth substituted for
Sophocles’
GPE
tragic myth and projected, as a sort of “primitive scene,” behind
Freud
ORG
’s self-analysis and the psychoanalysis of his patients.
33
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
(die
Intestschranke
PERSON
);
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
225
CARDINAL
. A footnote of
1915
DATE
clearly indicates that this is the level on which the correlation is established between the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
and
Totem
PRODUCT
and Taboo. The former work’s notion of a “barrier against incest” coincides with the latter’s notion of “taboo.”
34
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
authorizes this relative separation: “It will be found that the
two
CARDINAL
principle themes from which the title of this little book is derived—
totems and taboos-—have not received the same treatment. The analysis of
taboos is put forward as an assured and exhaustive attempt at the
solution of the problem. The investigation of totem ism does no more
than declare that ‘here is what psychoanalysis can at the moment
contribute towards elucidating the problem of the totem’
” (Preface)
WORK_OF_ART
. Toward
the beginning of the first essay
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
adds that “exogamy had originally—in the earliest times and in its true
meaning—nothing to do with totemism, but became attached to it (without
there being any underlying connection) at some time when marriage
restrictions became necessary” (
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
8
CARDINAL
-9;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
4
CARDINAL
).
If, then, we begin by staying clear of the scientific myth of totem, and remain at the level of the book’s
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
essays (
“The Horror of Incest”
WORK_OF_ART
and “
Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
WORK_OF_ART
”), what do we find in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo? Little more than an applied psychoanalysis, that is to say,
one that has been transposed from dreams and the neuroses to taboo. In
these
two
CARDINAL
essays,
Freud
ORG
proposes a psychoanalytic interpretation of a rather limited
ethnological subject matter. It would be useless to look to them for an
ethnological elucidation of the problem of institutionalization; this
problem is raised but left unresolved by the psychoanalytic
interpretation. It will be the function of the final ethnological myth
to make the transition from a mere applied psychoanalysis (in which the
model of dreams and neuroses is extended to taboo) to a theory of totem,
where ethnology will be regarded as solving the enigma posed by the
psychology of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex.
If, in the
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
essays of
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
, the psychoanalysis of taboo scarcely goes beyond an applied psychoanalysis, it is because of the book’s
two
CARDINAL
postulates (which are not, however, peculiar to it): on the one hand,
primitive peoples give us a well-preserved picture of an early phase of
our own development and so constitute an experimental illustration of
our prehistory; on the other hand, because of their great emotional
ambivalence, they are akin to neurotic patients. By applying
psychoanalysis to ethnography,
Freud
ORG
believes he is doing
two
CARDINAL
things at once: he affords the ethnologist an explanation of what the
latter describes but does not understand, and he gives the public—and
his incredulous colleagues—the experimental proof of the truth of
psychoanalysis. The counterpart of this operation is that without the
totemic myth the psychoanalytic explanation of taboo goes no further
than that of dreams and the neuroses and runs up against the fact of
prohibition and, behind prohibition, the fact of institutionalization or
authority.
Let us follow the movement of the proof, without
dwelling on the details of arguments of no interest to us here. The
initial core is the prohibition of incest: the most primitive of
primitive peoples— “these poor naked cannibals”—“set before themselves
with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of
avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social
organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into
relation with its attainment.” The social instrument of this prohibition
is the famous law of exogamy, which was treated extensively by Frazer
in his Totemism and Exogamy, and according to which there is “a law
against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one
another and consequently against their marrying.” 38 The basis of the
prohibition is therefore the fact of belonging to the same totem; hence,
in spite of our effort to bracket the totemic myth and only consider
taboo, we must immediately introduce the totemic bond that is the basis
of the prohibition; the substitution of a totem kinship for blood
relationship is what supports the entire edifice. It may be seen,
however, that the important factor at this level of the analysis is not
belief in the totem, nor even belief in the mystical nature of the bond
of totem kinship, but the social fact of the substitution of “group
marriage” for sexual promiscuity. Exogamy is the means of effecting this
substitution; in other words, the prohibition is the counterpart of the
change of level of sexuality; reduced to this minimum, the
interpretation of the prohibition against incest in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo rejoins the interpretation of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex in
the Three Essays on Sexuality
ORG
.
37
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
, following
L. H. Morgan
PERSON
, rightly saw that “classification” is the language of these new relations; speaking of marriage classes in a system of
two
CARDINAL
classes and
three
CARDINAL
subclasses, he notes: “While, however, totemic exogamy gives one the
impression of being a sacred ordinance of unknown origin—in short, of
being a custom—the complicated institution of the marriage classes, with
their subdivisions and the regulations attaching to them, look more
like the result of deliberate legislation, which may perhaps have taken
up the task of preventing incest afresh because the influence of the
totem was waning” {
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
14
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
9
CARDINAL
). Thus the classification reinforces and is eventually substituted for the prohibition of sacred origin.
Freud
ORG
is close here to the structuralism of
his day
DATE
, with this difference— which is obviously considerable—that the
classification is secondary with respect to the mystical bond of the
totem. However, the difference should not be exaggerated: even in this
appeal to the totemic bond, what counts is the attainment of culture,
which consists in the substitution of a social relationship for
spontaneous sexual activity; this biological-social change of level is
the positive and primary achievement as compared with the negative and
secondary achievement of the prohibition of incest.
That is the extent of the strictly ethnological contribution of the
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
essays of
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
. At this point the book’s direction is reversed; what follows is a
psychoanalytic explanation of the horror of incest, rather than a
sociological explanation of institutionalization whose negative aspect
is the prohibition of incest; the enigma of institutionalization is left
to the later scientific myth: “All that I have been able to add to our
understanding of [the horror of incest] is to emphasize the fact that it
is essentially an infantile feature and that it reveals a striking
agreement with the mental life of neurotic patients.” Thus the dominant
idea comes from the discovery of the incestuous theme of neurosis; the
horror of incest displayed by savages merely supplies proof of the
existence, in the open air as it were, of this central complex now lost
in the unconscious. The strictly institutional and structuring function
of the prohibition is lost sight of. I explain this shift in
two
CARDINAL
ways:
first
ORDINAL
, during the period of the
first
ORDINAL
topography, that is, prior to the discovery of the superego,
Freud
ORG
did not yet possess the theoretical concept of identification but had
to rely instead on the rather unwieldy idea of a reaction-formation on
the part of a higher psychical organization; we will see the decisive
role the essay of
1921
DATE
,
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego, plays in this connection.
Secondly
ORDINAL
,
Freud
ORG
is much more concerned with justifying the pathogenic role of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex in the neuroses than in establishing its structuring and
institutional role. Ethnology plays the role of experimental
verification; that is the most that can be said in defense of the
Freudian
NORP
ethnology: it is merely an accessory scaffolding of the theory of the neuroses. In this respect,
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
still belongs to the cycle of “analogical” interpretations, by which we have characterized applied psychoanalysis.
38
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
24
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
17
CARDINAL
. When
Freud
ORG
published separately the
four
CARDINAL
essays of
Totem and Taboo
ORG
in the review
Imago
ORG
, he gave them the title “
Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics
WORK_OF_ART
.”
39
CARDINAL
.
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
78-79
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
178
CARDINAL
. In a footnote in the
1915
DATE
edition,
Freud
ORG
distinguishes between sublimation and reaction-formation, whereas the text of
1905
DATE
ascribes both of these to the “mental dams”—“disgust, shame and morality” (ibid.).
40
CARDINAL
. A certain importance must undoubtedly be attached to the dispute with
Jung
PERSON
, who published his “
Wandlungen
ORG
und
Symbole
PRODUCT
der Libido” in
The pattern of the analogy is furnished by the
structural affinity between taboo and obsessional neurosis: the former
functions as a collective neurosis, the latter as an individual taboo.
Four
CARDINAL
characteristics assure the parallel: “(
1
CARDINAL
) the fact that the prohibitions lack any assignable motive; (
2
CARDINAL
) the fact that they are maintained by an internal necessity; (
3
CARDINAL
) the fact that they are easily displaceable and that there is a risk of infection from the prohibited object; and (
4
CARDINAL
) the fact that they give rise to injunctions for the performance of ceremonial acts.” <
111
CARDINAL
> But the most important point in this comparison lies in the
analysis of emotional ambivalence. Here the interpretation of taboo
serves as the pattern; a taboo is both the attractive and the fearful.
This emotional composition of desire and fear throws much light upon the
psychology of temptation and calls to mind
St. Paul
GPE
,
St. Augustine
PERSON
,
Kierkegaard
PERSON
, and
Nietzsche
ORG
. Taboo places us at a point where the forbidden is attractive because
it is forbidden, where the law excites concupiscence: “the basis of
taboo is a prohibited action, for performing which a strong inclination
exists in the unconscious.” <
112
CARDINAL
>
1912
DATE
and his “Versuch einer
Darstellung
PERSON
der
Psychoanalytischen Theorie”
PERSON
in
1913
DATE
: “The
four
CARDINAL
essays that follow ... offer a methodological contrast on the one hand to
Wilhelm Wundt’s
PERSON
extensive work, which applies the hypotheses and working methods of
non-analytic psychology to the same purposes, and on the other hand to
the writings of the
Zurich
GPE
school of psychoanalysis, which endeavour, on the contrary, to solve
the problems of individual psychology with the help of material derived
from social psychology
” (
WORK_OF_ART
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
3
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
, xiii). In
An Autobiographical Study (1925
GPE
),
Freud
ORG
will be more anxious to acknowledge his debt to
Jung
PERSON
: “Later on, in
1912
DATE
,
Jung
PERSON
’s forcible indications of the far-reaching analogies between the mental
products of neurotics and of primitive peoples led me to turn my
attention to that subject” (
GW
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
92
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
20
DATE
,
66
CARDINAL
). But this debt consists precisely in a “psychological” interpretation of ethnology.
41
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
38
CARDINAL
-39;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
28-29
DATE
.
42
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
42
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
32
DATE
.
From this point on, the burden of proof lies on the side of the
neuroses. The phenomenon of authority, with which desire is confronted,
is presupposed without being made explicit. “Dams” (to use an
expression from
the Three Essays
ORG
) have already been imposed upon and opposed to desire, which has
already become the desire to transgress. Consequently, in the remaining
explanation of
taboo <
113
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
continues to pursue his interpretation instead of going back to its
conditions and presuppositions. The interpretation spreads out to
encompass features that are increasingly further removed from the
central core of the ambivalence of the forbidden and the desired, and
which are mostly taken from
Frazer’s
PRODUCT
The Golden Bough
WORK_OF_ART
(ambivalent attitudes toward enemies, toward chiefs and kings, toward
the dead). An intricate psychology or even psychopathology of taboo is
worked out, whereas the properly institutional factor of prohibition is
never elaborated. <
114
CARDINAL
> The psychopathology often has far-reaching consequences. Thus, in
the case of royal ceremonial a comparison with taboo ceremonial and
obsessional ceremonial reveals that excessive respect is actually a
figurative way of doing what is forbidden, a disguised expression of
hostility, and that this hostility is connected with the father complex
of childhood. Primitive peoples are the well-preserved evidence of the
ambivalence of the psychical life; anxiety ultimately points to the
force of desires and the “indestructibility and insusceptibility to
correction which are attributes of unconscious processes.” <
115
CARDINAL
> Because he is a big child the savage gives us a clear picture on a
fantastic scale of what in our present condition we see only in the
highly concealed and softened figure of the moral imperative, or in the
distorted features of obsessional neurosis. Thus emotional ambivalence
is seen to be the “basis” not only of taboo conscience (and taboo sense
of guilt) but also of the moral imperative as formalized by Kant. <
116
CARDINAL
>
<
113
CARDINAL
> The
second
ORDINAL
essay.
<
114
CARDINAL
> In the next chapter we will see how the mechanism of “projection”
explains the appearance of transcendence connected with the religious
source of the forbidden and the feared; the mechanism of introjection,
by which a source of authority is set up within the ego, is thus
complicated by the mechanism of projection, by which the omnipotence of
thought is projected into real powers—demons, spirits, and gods.
Projection is not meant to account for institution as such, but for the
illusion of transcendence attaching to the belief in spirits and gods,
that is, in the real existence of powers higher than man. Projection is
the economic means by which an intrapsy-chical conflict is, if not
resolved, at least lessened; the externality of authority seems indeed
to be irreducible; it is presupposed in the very definition of taboo:
“Taboo is a primeval [uraltes] prohibition forcibly imposed (by some
authority) from outside, and directed against the most powerful longings
to which human beings are subject” (
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
45
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
34-35
CARDINAL
).
<
115
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
88
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
70
DATE
.
<
116
CARDINAL
> On this occasion,
Freud
ORG
connects
Gewissen
PERSON
with
Wissen
PERSON
: “For what is ‘conscience’ [
Gewissen
PERSON
]! On the evidence of language it is related to that of which one is
‘most certainly conscious’ [am gewissesten weto]. Indeed, in some
languages the words for ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’ [
Bewusstsein
PERSON
] can scarcely be distinguished. Conscience is the internal perception
of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. The stress,
however, is upon the fact that this rejection has no need to appeal to
anything else for support, that it is quite ‘certain [gewiss] of itself’
” (
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
85
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
6768
DATE
).
Did
Freud
ORG
think he had explained conscience by this emotional ambivalence?
Certain texts, which deftly transform the analogy into a real
relationship, would lead one to believe so. <
117
CARDINAL
> But such ambivalence is merely the manner in which we experience
certain human relations, once given the prohibition that flows from the
presence of a tie superior to desire: the father figure in the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, the transition from biological relations to “group kinship” in the totemic system, lead us back to the
first
ORDINAL
phenomenon of authority or institutionalization. But up to this point
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
has thrown more light on the emotional repercussions of that phenomenon
than on its origin “external” to desire. The psychology of temptation,
to which the theme of emotional ambivalence belongs, makes us acutely
aware of the lack of a more original dialectic of desire and law. What
is left unsaid in these
two
CARDINAL
essays is the fact of institutionalization itself. <
118
CARDINAL
>
<
117
CARDINAL
> “If I am not mistaken, the explanation of taboo also throws light
on the nature and origin of conscience. It is possible, without any
stretching of the sense of the terms, to speak of a taboo conscience or,
after a taboo has been violated, of a taboo sense of guilt. Taboo
conscience is probably the earliest form in which the phenomenon of
conscience is met with. . . . In fact, one may venture to say that if we
cannot trace the origin of the sense of guilt in obsessional neurotics,
there can be no hope of our ever tracing it. This task can be directly
achieved in the case of individual neurotic patients, and we may rely
upon reaching a similar solution by inference in the case of primitive
peoples” (ibid.). The whole subsequent history of morality seems to
reduce itself to a history of ambivalence itself: “The only possible
reason why [moral] prohibitions no longer take the form of taboos must
be some change in the circumstances governing the ambivalence underlying
them” (
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
88
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
71
CARDINAL
).
<
118
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
lifts a corner of the veil when he admits that “taboo is not a neurosis
but a social institution [Bildung]” (ibid.), and that “the fact which
In order to fill in this gap,
Freud
ORG
posits at the origin of mankind a real
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, an original parricide, of which all later history bears the scar. The last essay of
Totem
PRODUCT
and Taboo works out a theory of totemism whose elements are borrowed from various sources and held together by an
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex projected into the prehistory of mankind.
From Frazer—at least in
PERSON
Totemism and Exogamy—and Wundt
WORK_OF_ART
,
Freud
ORG
derives the conviction that the social function of taboo depends upon
the religious function of totemism, that the law of exogamy originates
from the totem
kinship—
ORG
although this thesis was subject to much hesitation and changes of opinion on the part of
Frazer
PRODUCT
himself and went against the general tendency of ethnologists to dissociate totemism and exogamy. <
119
CARDINAL
> According to
Freud
ORG
, the savage’s belief in actual descent from the totem is the reason why
he must not kill the totem (or what stands for it) or marry women of
the same group; we recognize here the
two
CARDINAL
major prohibitions of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. All that remains is to discover the father figure in the totem in order to secure the historical origin of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex.
is characteristic of the neurosis is the preponderance of the sexual over the social instinctual elements
” {GW,
PRODUCT
9
CARDINAL
,
91
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
73
CARDINAL
). But he immediately goes on to say that “the corresponding cultural
formations, on the other hand, are based upon social instincts,
originating from the combination of egoistic and erotic elements” (
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
91
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
74
DATE
). The difference comes up again in another manner: the neurotic, in
subjection to the pleasure principle, flees reality, which he finds
unsatisfying; but
one
CARDINAL
of the fundamental characteristics of the real world from which the
neurotic withdraws and excludes himself is the factor of “human society
and of the institutions collectively created by it” (ibid.). How does it
happen that this social creation and its resultant institutions are
connected with the reality principle rather than with the pleasure
principle? This is the question that remains unanswered in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo.
49
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
132
CARDINAL
,
146
CARDINAL
,
176
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
108
CARDINAL
,
120
CARDINAL
,
146
CARDINAL
. “Thus psychoanalysis, in contradiction to the more recent views of the
totemic system but in agreement with the earlier ones, requires us to
assume that totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a
simultaneous origin.”
The decisive link is supplied by psychoanalysis itself. The case of “little Hans” and that of a patient of
Ferenczi
PERSON
’s convinced
Freud
ORG
that the father is the masked theme of animal phobia in childhood: “The
new fact that we have learnt from the analysis of ‘little Hans’ —a fact
with an important bearing on totemism—is that in such
circumstances
children displace some of their feelings from their father onto an
animal.” Deciphered in infantile neurosis, this displacement of the
father theme onto an animal figure will henceforth serve as the guiding
thread in the labyrinth of ethnological explanations;
Freud
ORG
is also encouraged in this direction by the parallel already stressed
between the savage’s emotional ambivalence toward taboo and the
ambivalence of the child’s relations to his father, the displacement
onto the animal figure being the unsuccessful solution of that
ambivalence. All that remains is to find a historical equivalent of the
fantasy displacement seen in the case of little
Hans
NORP
; what this case presents in small letters must now be found written in the large letters of prehistory.
The discovery of the father complex in animal phobias would seem to be what led
Freud
ORG
to combine
two
CARDINAL
decisive and quite venturesome features with the primary nucleus of the totem theory (the Frazer-Wundt nucleus). From
Darwin
PERSON
and Atkinson he takes over a theory of the primal horde, according to
which the jealousy of the male is alleged to play the role of excluding
the young males from sharing the females whom the leader wishes to
monopolize, although it is not clear, at least in
Darwin
PERSON
, just how force is transformed into right and jealousy into the law of
exogamy. Even more important, however, is the theory he takes from
Robertson Smith
PERSON
, the author of
Religion of the Semites (1889
ORG
);
Smith
ORG
’s theory of the totem meal will enable
Freud
ORG
to patch up the holes in his explanation. It is assumed that sacrifice
at the altar plays the same part in all religions, that it is always an
act
50
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
157
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
129
CARDINAL
. Ferenczi’s contribution is essential, for from him
Freud
ORG
borrows the threat of castration that will later play such a large
role, not “in direct relation with [the] Oedipus complex but on the
basis of its narcissistic precondition, the fear of castration” (
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
157
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
130
CARDINAL
). This theme will be taken up again in the paper on “
The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
WORK_OF_ART
” (
1924
DATE
).
51
CARDINAL
.
J. J. Atkinson
PERSON
,
Primal Law
ORG
(
London 1903
DATE
).
52
CARDINAL
. The only allusion pointing toward
Freud
ORG
’s explanation is the following: “The younger males, being thus expelled
and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a
partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the same
family” (
Darwin
PERSON
,
The Descent of Man
WORK_OF_ART
[
1871
DATE
],
2
CARDINAL
,
362
CARDINAL
; quoted in
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
153
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
125
CARDINAL
). One might find in this text a slight indication in favor of what we shall later call the covenant of the brothers.
of
commensal fellowship between the deity and his worshipers, that the
oldest form of sacrifice is the sacrifice of animals, that the slaughter
of a victim is permissible for the clan but illegal for the individual,
and finally that the sacrificial animal is identical with the ancient
totem animal. Thus the totem meal would furnish the ethnological
“proof,” ever elusive, of the famous totemic kinship. To this schema,
already quite simplified, there must be added “a few probable features”:
the totem animal was cruelly slaughtered, devoured raw, then lamented
and bewailed, as a prelude to the festive rejoicing.
The materials have now been gathered together.
One
CARDINAL
has only to combine
Frazer
PRODUCT
,
Wundt
GPE
,
Darwin
PERSON
, Atkinson, and
Robertson Smith
PERSON
to get the following story:
One
CARDINAL
day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and
devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.
United
ORG
, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been
impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps
command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior
strength.)
Cannibal
ORG
savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their
victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless
been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers:
and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification
with him, and each
one
CARDINAL
of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is
perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a
commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the
beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral
restrictions and of religion.
It is difficult to resist the impression that the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, deciphered in dreams and the neuroses, is what enabled
Freud
ORG
to select from the available ethnological materials just those factors that allow for the reconstruction of a collective
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex of mankind in the sense of an actual event that occurred at the begin-
53.
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
169
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
140
CARDINAL
.
ning of history.
Identification
NORP
with the totem and ambivalence in its regard are reified, so to speak,
in what is now a literal, and not a symbolic, interpretation. If the
dreamed animal in animal phobia stands for the father, the ethnological
myth allows the father to be substituted for the animal. Thus the
symbolic displacement in dreams and the neuroses is paralleled and
counterbalanced by a real substitution which is supposed to have taken
place in history: “All we have done is to take at its literal value an
expression used by these people, which they have therefore been glad to
keep in the background.
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
, on the contrary, leads us to put special stress upon this same point
and to take it as the starting point of our attempt at explaining
totemism.” <120><121>
<
120
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
-60; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
131
CARDINAL
.
<
121
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
saw, indeed, the many difficulties involved in this appeal to
psychological heredity, that embarrassing version of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics (
Totem and Taboo
ORG
,
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
155
CARDINAL
,
158
CARDINAL
). With increasing obstinacy,
Freud
ORG
will assume all its inconveniences in
Moses
ORG
and Monotheism. For the critique by the ethnologists, cf.
B. Malinowski
PERSON
, Sex and
Repression in Savage Society
ORG
(
New York
GPE
,
Humanities Press
ORG
,
1927
DATE
), especially Part III,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
.
A. L. Kroeber
PERSON
, “
An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,” Am. Anthropologist,
22
DATE
(
1920
DATE
),
48-57
CARDINAL
; “
Totem and Taboo in Retrospect
WORK_OF_ART
,” Am.
J. of Sociology,
45
CARDINAL
(1939),
446-50
CARDINAL
; Anthropology (rev. ed.
New York
GPE
,
Harcourt Brace
PERSON
,
1948
DATE
), pp.
616-17
CARDINAL
.
Claude Levi-Strauss
PERSON
,
Les Structures
ORG
elementaires de la parente (
Paris
GPE
,
P.U.F.
ORG
,
1949
DATE
).
The psychoanalytic interpretation of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex is thus extended into a realistic archeology; it preens itself
on being a literal interpretation of totemism. The meaning of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, deciphered in the semitransparency of dreams and the neuroses,
solidifies into a real equivalence: the totem is the father; the father
was killed and eaten; the brothers never got over their remorse for the
deed; to reconcile themselves with their father and with themselves,
they invented morality. We now have a real event in place of a fantasy;
upon this
first
ORDINAL
stone it is possible to erect all the other conflict situations which
hitherto were only deciphered. Unfortunately, the truth is that the
primal parricide is merely an event constructed out of ethnological
scraps on the pattern of the fantasy deciphered by analysis. Taken as a
scientific document,
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
is simply a huge vicious circle in which an analyst’s fantasy responds to the analysand’s.
Consequently,
one does psychoanalysis a service, not by defending its scientific myth
as science, but by interpreting it as myth. At the end of
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
,
Freud
ORG
thinks he can derive
Greek
NORP
tragedy from the historic totem meal. <
122
CARDINAL
> The truth of the matter is just the reverse: the
Freudian
NORP
myth is the positivist transposition, in terms of the ethnography of
the beginning of the twentieth century
DATE
, of the tragic myth itself. By this positivist transposition,
Freud
ORG
believes he is prefacing the fantasies of his patients and of his
selfanalysis with a true history. But this rational fantasy of
Freud
ORG
the man, later adopted by his school, is comparable to
Plato
ORG
’s construction in
Book IV of the Republic
ORG
, where the philosopher sets out to read the “small letters” of the human soul, with its
three
CARDINAL
powers, in the “large letters” of the
City
LOC
with its
three
CARDINAL
social classes. The same goes for
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
: in the father and sons of the
Darwinian
NORP
horde,
Freud
ORG
deciphers the jealousy of the father and the violent birth of society; in the totem meal of
Robertson Smith’s
PERSON
hypothesis, he deciphers the ambivalence of love and hate, of
destruction and participation, which animates the symbolism of the meal
through to its most brutal cannibalistic expression; in the mourning
that precedes the festival, he deciphers object-loss, the narrow door of
every metamorphosis of love; in remorse and deferred obedience, he
deciphers the transition to social organization, through the double
suffering arising from the crime and from renunciation. In short, by
means of this new tragic myth he interprets the whole of history as
inheriting the crime: “Society was now based on complicity in the common
crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and the remorse
attaching to it; while morality was based partly on the
exigencies
CARDINAL
of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of guilt.” <
123
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
122
CARDINAL
> “But why had the
Hero
GPE
of tragedy to suffer? and what was the meaning of his ‘tragic guilt’? I
will cut the discussion short and give a quick reply. He had to suffer
because he was the primal father, the
Hero
PERSON
of the great primeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a
tremendous twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to
take upon himself in order to relieve the
Chorus
FAC
from theirs” (.GW,
9
CARDINAL
,
188
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
156
CARDINAL
). This interpretation of the tragic hero as the redeemer of the chorus,
the chorus itself being identified with the company of brothers, allows
Freud
ORG
to locate
Greek
NORP
tragedy halfway between the totem meal and
the Passion of Christ
ORG
.
<
123
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
176
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
146
CARDINAL
.
By this new and apparently scientific myth,
Freud
ORG
breaks with
any view of history that would eliminate from history what
Hegel
PERSON
called the “work of the negative.” The ethical history of mankind is
not the rationalization of utility, but the rationalization of an
ambivalent crime, of a liberating crime, which at the same time remains
the original wound; this is the meaning of the totem meal, the ambiguous
celebration of mourning and festival.
By the same token, the
problem of institutionalization, or social organization, reappears in
full force; in mythical terms, how could the prohibition against
“fratricide” arise from a “parricide”? By unmasking the father figure in
the alleged totem,
Freud
ORG
intensified the problem he wished to solve, the ego’s adoption of
external prohibitions. Of course, without the jealousy of the father of
the horde, there are no prohibitions; and without the parricide there is
no stopping of the jealousy. But the
two
CARDINAL
ciphers, jealousy and parricide, are still ciphers of violence:
parricide puts a stop to jealousy; but what puts a stop to parricide as a
repeatable crime? This was the problem already faced by Aeschylus in
the
Oresteia
ORG
.
Freud
ORG
readily acknowledges it: remorse and deferred obedience enable one to
speak of a covenant with the father, but at most this explains the
prohibition of killing, not the prohibition against incest. The latter
requires another covenant, one between the brothers; by it they decide
not to repeat the father’s jealousy, they renounce the claim to violent
possession, even though this had been the motive for the killing: “Thus
the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but—not,
perhaps, until they had passed through many crises—to institute the law
against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they
desired and who had been their chief motive for despatching their
father.” And a bit further on:
In thus guaranteeing one another’s
lives, the brothers were declaring that no one of them must be treated
by another as their father was treated by them all jointly. They were
precluding the possibility of a repetition of their father’s fate. To
the religiously-based prohibition against killing the totem was now
added the socially-based prohibition against fratricide.
<124><125>
<
124
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
174
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
144
CARDINAL
.
<
125
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
176
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
146
CARDINAL
.
With this renunciation of violence, under the goad of discord,
there is given the necessary condition for the birth of social
organization: the true problem of law is not parricide but fratricide;
in the symbol of the
brothers’
ORG
covenant
Freud
ORG
encountered the basic requisite of analytic explanation, which was the problem of
Hobbes
PERSON
,
Spinoza
PERSON
,
Rousseau
PERSON
, and
Hegel—
PERSON
namely, the change from war to law; the question is whether this change
still falls under an economics of desire. The whole problematic of the
superego, which we are now going to consider, centers on this point: the
question no longer is the birth of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, but its dissolution in the building-up of the superego.
THE
METAPSYCHOLOGICAL
ORG
problem: the notion OF THE superego
At the beginning of this chapter we proposed to distinguish between the
two
QUANTITY
Freudian
NORP
concepts of the ego ideal and the superego by assigning the
first
ORDINAL
to the descriptive, phenomenal, symptomatological plane and the
second
ORDINAL
to the theoretical, systematic, economic plane. The superego is, in
effect, a metapsychological construct on a par with those we considered
in the context of the
first
ORDINAL
topography. But if the sequence of ego, id, and superego is comparable
from the epistemological point of view to the sequence of
Cs
PERSON
., Pcs., and
Ucs
PERSON
., it may legitimately be asked how it is superimposed upon the latter. To say that the
first
ORDINAL
topography had to do with “psychical localities” and the
second
ORDINAL
with “roles” or personological functions is not very illuminating, for the distinction remains in the metaphorical order. <
126
CARDINAL
> However, the metaphor does orient the research in the right
direction, for the difference between roles and localities points to a
difference in the manner of treating economic problems. In both cases,
of course, the problem remains an economic one; in the
second
ORDINAL
topography as in the
first
ORDINAL
, it is always a question of the changes of cathexis. But
<
126
CARDINAL
> For the metaphor of the
three
CARDINAL
territories inhabited by
three
CARDINAL
populations whose distribution partly does and partly does not correspond to the land areas, see New Introductory Lectures,
GW
PERSON
,
15
CARDINAL
,
79
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
72
CARDINAL
-73.
whereas the
first
ORDINAL
topography treats these cathectic changes from the viewpoint of
exclusion from consciousness or access to consciousness (whether this
access takes place in disguised or substitute, recognized or
unrecognized forms), the
second
ORDINAL
topography deals with the cathectic changes from the viewpoint of the
ego’s force or weakness, hence from the viewpoint of the ego’s status of
dominance or submission. According to the title of
one
CARDINAL
of the chapters of The Ego and the Id, the theme of the
second
ORDINAL
topography is “the dependent relationships of the ego” (Ch.
5
CARDINAL
). These dependent relationships are
first
ORDINAL
of all the relations of master-slave: the ego’s dependence on the id,
the ego’s dependence on the external world, the ego’s dependence on the
superego. Through these alienating relations there is formed a
personology: the role of the ego, the personal pronoun, is constituted
in relation to the anonymous, the sublime, and the real, which are
variations on the personal pronoun.
What is the task of this economics?
Its
task is to show that what has thus far remained external to desire is
actually a “differentiation” of the instinctual substrate; in other
words, to make an economic process of the distribution of cathexis
correspond to the historic process of the introjection of authority. A
new connection is thus set up between hermeneutics and economics: the
Oedipus
LOC
complex was deciphered in myth and history, in dreams and the neuroses:
it is now a matter of stating in topographic and economic terms the
corresponding energy distribution. The
two
CARDINAL
topographies express
two
CARDINAL
types of differentiation of the instinctual substrate.
Parallel
PERSON
to the differentiation of the ego, which
Freud
ORG
attributes to the influence of the external world and assigns to the
Pcpt
PERSON
.-Cs. system, there must be considered another differentiation,
“internal” rather than “superficial,” sublime rather than perceptual:
this differentiation, this modification of the instincts is what
Freud
ORG
calls the superego. The new economics is accordingly much more than a
translation of a mass of clinical, psychological, and ethnographical
material into a conventional language. It has the task of solving a
problem that has remained unsol-vable on both the descriptive and the
historical planes; the fact of authority has constantly appeared as the
presupposition of the individual or the collective
Oedipus
LOC
complex; it is necessary to introduce the fact of authority, of restrictions, in order to move from
individual
or collective prehistory to the history of the adult and the civilized
person. The entire effort of the new theory of agencies is aimed at
bringing authority into the history of desire, at making it appear as a
“differentiation” of desire; the institution of the superego will be the
answer to this requirement. There is therefore a reciprocal
relationship between the genetic and the economic points of view. On the
one
CARDINAL
side, the new theory of agencies reveals the repercussion which the genetic point of view and the discovery of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex have upon the
first
ORDINAL
systematization; on the other, it gives the genesis a conceptual
structure which enables it, if not to resolve, at least to pose in
systematic terms its central problem: how the sublime arises within
desire. If the institution of the superego hinges upon the
Oedipus
LOC
drama, the question is how to interrelate the Oedipus event and the
superego’s advent and to state this relationship in economic terms.
The
solution to this problem—if psychoanalysis may be said to have solved
it—is very concisely stated in the celebrated essay of
1923
DATE
, The Ego and the Id. The labored and even problematic character of the
solution will be seen more clearly if this text is treated as a
synthesis of a series of metapsychological sketches which still date
from the period of the
first
ORDINAL
topography. We shall point out
three or four
CARDINAL
of the main steps of the synthesis.
A note added in
1920
DATE
to the
third
ORDINAL
of the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
indicates in what direction the solution was sought: “Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis.” The dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is already seen as the key to the institution of the superego.
Thus the economic problem of the superego shifts the focus of interest
away from the formation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex toward the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex (to anticipate the title of an article of
1924
DATE
).
A
first
ORDINAL
step is taken in the paper “
On Narcissism: An Introduction
WORK_OF_ART
.” It is implied in this essay that the later concept of identi-
62
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
, n.
2
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
226
CARDINAL
, n.
1
CARDINAL
(added in
1920
DATE
).
63
CARDINAL
. We recall how
Freud
ORG
“introduces” narcissism into psychoanalysis (see above, p.
127
CARDINAL
and n.
31
CARDINAL
). In
the “Dialectic”
EVENT
we will show the philosophical significance of narcissism, understood as the abortive
Cogito
PERSON
. It is important therefore to grasp just how
Freud
ORG
attempts to derive the sublime, the higher ego, from this abortive
Cogito
PERSON
.
fication does not contain the whole economics of the superego,
for the essay proposes a schema of differentiation which, it seems to
me, was neither absorbed nor abolished by
the later
DATE
theory. According to this schema, the formation of ideals, or
idealization, is a differentiation within narcissism. But how?
Repression,
Freud
ORG
remarks, arises from the ego, as the pole of the individual’s cultural and ethical ideas. However, if
one
CARDINAL
keeps in mind that this ego is at the same time self-love or self-respect (
Selbstachtung
ORG
), it is possible to subject the conditioning factor of repression to the libido theory: “We can say that the
one
CARDINAL
man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego .
. . For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning
factor of repression.” But what is idealization? “This ideal ego is now
the target of the selflove which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual
ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced onto this
new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of
every perfection that is of value.” Incapable of giving up an earlier
satisfaction, the “narcissistic perfection of his childhood,” “he seeks
to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before
him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his
childhood in which he was his own ideal.” Thus idealization is a way of
retaining the narcissistic perfection of childhood by displacing it onto
a new figure.
What can be constructed on such a narrow basis?
Freud
ORG
himself is not very explicit; he is content with adding
two
CARDINAL
remarks.
Idealization
ORG
is not sublimation; the latter changes the aim of an instinct, and
hence the instinct itself in its orientation, whereas idealization only
changes the instinct’s object, without any alteration in the instinct’s
basic orientation.
Idealization “heightens the
LAW
demands of the ego,” thus raising the level of repression; sublimation
is a different vicissitude from repression, a true inner transformation
of instinct. This
first
ORDINAL
addition enables
Freud
ORG
to affirm that idealization is just
one
CARDINAL
method of forming the superego, the narcissistic way.
A
second
ORDINAL
remark indicates that this method must be coordinated
64
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
93-94
DATE
.
65
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94
DATE
.
66
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
67
CARDINAL
. This discovery is of great importance, for it means that our “better ego” is in a sense in line with the false
Cogito
PERSON
, the abortive
Cogito
PERSON
.
with another. A bit further on
Freud
ORG
writes: “It would not surprise us if we were to find a special
psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic
satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in
view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.”
<
127
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
had already come upon this observing agency not only in delusions of
observation but even within the dream-work, at least in dreams where the
dreamer observes himself dreaming, sleeping, and awakening. What
Freud
ORG
is now suggesting is that the self-observation of dreams and delusional
insanity, the dream-censorship, the ego ideal, and moral conscience
must constitute one and the same agency; but on the whole the
manifestations of this one agency indicate a source that is external to
narcissism, <
128
CARDINAL
> the parental source. There are good grounds for thinking that if a
part of the narcissistic energy is displaced onto an ego that is more
ideal than real, it is because that energy is “attracted” by the nucleus
derived from the parental complex. To state this in a different way, in
order that narcissism may be both displaced and retained in the form of
an ideal, it must be mediated by authority. Thus idealization points
back to identification.
<
127
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
162
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
95
DATE
.
<
128
CARDINAL
> “For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose
behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical
influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice),
to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him
and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his
environment— his fellow-men—and public opinion. . . . The institution of
conscience was at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism,
and subsequently of that of society—a process which is repeated in what
takes place when a tendency towards repression develops out of a
prohibition or obstacle that came in the
first
ORDINAL
instance from without” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
163
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
96
CARDINAL
).
However, it may be that the narcissistic factor of
idealization is what gives a basis to identification and explains how
influences from other persons become incorporated into the self; for
identification to succeed, it may be necessary that the various
influences from other people that form the ego ideal unite into an ideal
ego rooted in narcissism. This line of thought would somewhat favor the
distinction between ideal ego and ego ideal which has but little
support in
Freud
ORG
himself. <
129
CARDINAL
> If
Freud
PERSON
did not develop it, it is be-
<
129
CARDINAL
> The expression
Idealich
GPE
(ideal ego;
Fr
GPE
., moi ideal) rarely occurs. We met it in the paper “On Narcissism” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
); it reappears
cause he wished to carry his radicalism to its utmost limits: the superego arises from an external source.
The
process of identification, to which idealization refers us, also has a
long history. In a section dealing with the successive organizations of
sexuality, added in
1915
DATE
to the
second
ORDINAL
of
the Three Essays
ORG
,
Freud
ORG
shows the connection between identification and the so-called oral or
cannibalistic pregenital organization; the whole question, however, is
whether the identification required by the theory of the superego is a
matter of possessing, of having; or whether the desire to be like is not
radically different from the desire to have, the most brutal expression
of which is the act of devouring.
Freud
ORG
began to recognize the extent of this process in the paper “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
.” For the
first
ORDINAL
time, identification is conceived as a reaction to the loss of an
object, a function appearing in the contrast between melancholia and
mourning. In the work of mourning, the libido is obeying the orders of
reality to give up all its attachments
one
CARDINAL
by
one
CARDINAL
, to free itself by withdrawal of cathexis; in melancholia the process
is entirely different. An identification of the ego with the lost object
enables the libido to pursue its cathecting interiorly; by virtue of
this identification the ego becomes the ambivalent object of its own
love and hate; object-loss is transformed into ego-loss, and the
conflict between the ego and the loved person is carried over into the
new split between the critical faculty of the ego and the ego as altered
by identification. <
130
CARDINAL
>
in The Ego and the Id, written
Ideal
ORG
-lch; to my knowledge it does not occur elsewhere. The expression Ichideal (ego ideal;
Fr
GPE
., ideal du moi), on the contrary, is found nearly a
hundred
CARDINAL
times (in this connection, the
French
NORP
translations are misleading for they often translate Ichideal by moi ideal). In spite of its rarity, the expression
Idealich
GPE
should be regarded as intentional: the context indicates that when
Freud
ORG
speaks of the ideal ego it is in contrast with the real or “actual
ego.” The ideal ego is the displaced narcissistic ego. The expression is
strictly synonymous with “the narcissistic ego ideal”; hence it should
firmly retain its narcissistic context. This in no way prevents us from
stressing the difference, relying here on
Freud
ORG
’s remarks about the self-respect originally attaching to narcissism, a factor which
Freud
ORG
calls
Selbstachtung
ORG
and which is precisely narcissism’s own ideal: in the “narcissism of his childhood” the subject “was his own ideal” (
G W
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
).
72
CARDINAL
. “The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was
This
text on identification supplies the bridge between narcissism and the
introjection of ideal models that we will need further on. In economic
terms, identification—at least in melancholia—is a regression from
object-libido to the narcissistic substrate. Following a suggestion by
Otto Rank
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
describes narcissistic identification thus: “
Melancholia
GPE
. . . borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from
the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to
narcissism.” <
131
CARDINAL
> It is true that this “narcissistic identification” is a
pathological identification; its affinity to devouring, which represents
a narcissistic stage of the libido, is evidence that it belongs to the
archaic organizations of the libido; nevertheless, through this
pathological structure, a general process takes form: the prolongation
of the lost object in the ego.
brought to an end. But the free
libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the
ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but
served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned
object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter
could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an
object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed
into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person
into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as
altered by identification” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
435
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
249
CARDINAL
).
73
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
437
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
250
CARDINAL
.
Thus, during the period of the
first
ORDINAL
topography the problem is extremely complex.
First
ORDINAL
,
Freud
ORG
spoke of sublimation as an instinctual vicissitude distinct from all others, especially from repression;
secondly
ORDINAL
, he began to elaborate the concept of idealization on the basis of
narcissism; finally, he sketched the concept of identification starting
from the oral phase of the libido and he began to fink narcissism and
identification together on the model of the narcissistic identification
in melancholia. But there are a number of things that still remain
unclear: the relationship between the
three
CARDINAL
themes of sublimation, idealization, and identification; their common relation to the
Oedipus
LOC
complex; and in particular the connection between identification with
the lost object in melancholia and identification with the father in the
Oedipus
LOC
complex—how can the regressive character of narcissistic identification
accord with the structuring function of the identification that results
in the superego?
The gap between these texts contemporary with the
first
ORDINAL
topography and the great synthesis of The Ego and the Id is bridged by
the
seventh
ORDINAL
chapter of
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego (
1921
DATE
). In this last great text prior to The Ego and the Id,
Freud
ORG
inquires into the nature of the “libidinal ties” that “characterize a group [Mass].'”
74
DATE
Just as
Totem
GPE
and
Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
examined in psychoanalytic terms the problem raised by
Wundt
GPE
and Frazer of the totemic origin of the prohibition against incest, this important and relatively profuse essay examines
Gustave Le Bon’s
PERSON
problem of “group psychology” and
Theodor Lipps’
PERSON
problem of imitation and emotional contagion. In order to bring his own
analysis to bear on the concepts of imitation, emotional contagion, and
empathy (
Einfiihlung
PERSON
), then in vogue in social psychology,
Freud
ORG
revises his concept of identification and for the
first
ORDINAL
time gives it a much broader application than it had in the earlier
essays. But at the same time the concept of identification becomes a
problem rather than a solution, for it now tends to cover the same area
as that of imitation or empathy. Chapter
7
CARDINAL
, entitled “
Identification
NORP
,” begins thus: “
Identification
NORP
is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.”
Let us examine this important text. For the
first
ORDINAL
time identification is brought into conjunction with the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. To our great surprise, however, we learn that identification precedes the
Oedipus
LOC
complex as much as it succeeds it. In the early phases of the complex, a
little boy shows a special interest in his father; he “would like to
grow like him and be like him.” Then comes, “at the same time as this
identification, or
a little later
DATE
,” the movement of the libido toward the mother.
He then exhibits, therefore,
two
CARDINAL
psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis
towards his mother and an identification with his father which takes
him as his model [vor-bildliche]. The
two
CARDINAL
subsist side by side for a time without any
74
CARDINAL
.
Massenpsychologie
PERSON
und lch-Analyse,
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
110
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
101
CARDINAL
.
75
CARDINAL
. “Another suspicion may tell us that we are far from having exhausted
the problem of identification, and that we are faced by the process
which psychology calls ‘empathy’ [
Einfiihlung
ORG
] and which plays the largest part in our understanding of what is
inherently foreign to our ego in other people. But we shall here limit
ourselves to the immediate emotional effects of identification, and
shall leave on one side its significance for our intellectual life
” {
PRODUCT
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
118
CARDINAL
-19; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
108
CARDINAL
).
mutual influence or interference. In consequence of an
irresistible advance towards a unification of mental life, they come
together at last; and the normal
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex originates from their confluence. <
132
CARDINAL
>
<
132
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
115
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
105
CARDINAL
.
It seems that the boy’s desire for his mother forces the
identification to take on the coloring of jealousy; the identification
then turns into the wish to replace the father, the wish for his death.
At this stage identification is no longer the origin of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex but its result. But if we go back from this
identification-result to the identification-condition, the latter turns
out to be a great enigma.
Freud
ORG
himself forcefully expresses the enigma as follows:
It is easy
to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the
father and the choice of the father as an object. In the
first
ORDINAL
case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the
second
ORDINAL
he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends
upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the
ego. The former kind of tie is therefore already possible before any
sexual object-choice has been made. It is much more difficult to give a
clear metapsychological representation of the distinction. We can only
see that identification endeavours to mould a person’s own ego after the
fashion of the one that has been taken as a model. <
133
CARDINAL
>
<
133
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
116
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
106
CARDINAL
.
Never will
Freud
ORG
more vigorously express the problematic and un-dogmatic nature of identification.
How, indeed, is this identification to be related to an economics of desire? There are more questions than answers. In the
first
ORDINAL
place, what about the oral origin of identification? It seems that only
the desire to “have,” and not the desire to “be like,” derives from the
oral phase of the libido’s organization (the phase “in which the object
that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way
annihilated as such”).
Secondly
ORDINAL
, what about the narcissistic root of identification? Neurotic
identification, which is dealt with in the remainder of the chapter,
appears to be constructed upon a
neurotic leaning toward the
father, rather than upon the desire to become like him; the relationship
is instanced in the case of
Dora
PERSON
, who imitated her father’s cough.
Freud
ORG
summarizes his analysis of that case in the following terms: “We can
only describe the state of things by saying that identification has
appeared instead of object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed
to identification.” This is a situation, therefore, not of a primordial
identification preceding every object-choice, but of a derived
identification arising from libidinal object-choice through a regression
to narcissism; we are back on the grounds of the narcissistic
identification described in “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
” and “On Narcissism.” And so there are
at least two
CARDINAL
identifications, perhaps even
three
CARDINAL
,
Freud
ORG
notes, if one considers that an identification may occur apart from any
emotional attitude toward the person who is being imitated, as in the
phenomenon of mental infection; such an identification is frequently
seen in cases of hysteria where the imitation occurs independently of
any sympathy; this
third
ORDINAL
form rejoins the
Einfiih
LANGUAGE
-lung of the psychologists.
The picture of identification turns out to be more complex than we had counted on.
Freud
ORG
summarizes it thus:
What we have learned from these
three
CARDINAL
sources may be summarized as follows.
First
ORDINAL
, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object;
secondly
ORDINAL
, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal
object-tie, as it were by means of intro-jection of the object into the
ego; and
thirdly
ORDINAL
, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with
some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct.
There are many indications that the identification that terminates the
Oedipus
LOC
complex manifests the features of this multiple identification.
At the end of the chapter,
Freud
ORG
integrates into his analysis of identification the descriptions that had previously been given in “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
” and “On Narcissism.” The manner in which melancholia internalizes revenge against the lost object ap-
79
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
118
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
107-08
DATE
.
pears as a new variant of identification; by identifying
itself with the object of its hatred, the ego is transformed into a
center of hatred against itself, and this is comparable to what we
described as the critical agency within the ego that observes, judges,
condemns. But
Freud
ORG
does not say, in this text, how the adoption of an external ideal can
be likened to the introjection of a lost object based on the model of
melancholia on the one hand and to a differentiation of narcissism on
the other. By its very composition, the text proceeds more by a series
of convergent examples than by a systematic construction. Only the
economics of the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex will enable us to interrelate the following still disconnected
themes: identification with an external ideal, introjection of the lost
object into the ego, differentiation of narcissism by the formation of
ideals.
The Ego and the Id <
134
CARDINAL
> marks
MONEY
a decisive advance in the integration of these materials because of its resolutely topographic-economic character, <
135
CARDINAL
> which is, moreover, what makes this text so
<134>
Das Ich
PERSON
und das
Es
ORG
(
1923
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
237
CARDINAL
-89; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
12-66
DATE
.
Freud
ORG
expressly takes the term
Es
ORG
(
Fr
GPE
.,
Qa
PERSON
) from
Georg Groddeck
PERSON
, the author of a book entitled
Das Buck
PERSON
vom
Es
ORG
(
1923
DATE
), and through him, from
Nietzsche
ORG
. The neuter pronoun is a very good choice to denote the anonymous,
passive, unknown, and uncontrollable aspects of the forces previously
designated by the term “unconscious.” In the New Introductory Lectures
Freud writes that “it is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality;
what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the
dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of
that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast
to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a
cauldron full of seething excitations” (
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
80
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
73
CARDINAL
). The rest of the text clearly indicates that the id has taken over all
the characteristics formerly attributed to the unconscious: the
pleasure principle, timelessness, indestructibility of the primary
processes, etc.
two
CARDINAL
systems of representation, a compromise in which the other dimension of interiority, that of the sublime, has no place. Toward
the end of the thirty-first
DATE
lecture in the New Introductory Lectures of
1933
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
will try to sketch a more complete diagram which will include the superego.
extremely
difficult. One must convince oneself once and for all that it is a
question not of phenomenal but of “systematic” entities, in the sense
stated in the
first
ORDINAL
chapter of The Ego and the
Id.
GPE
This work places the synthesis of the earlier materials on the meta-psychological level of
the “Project” of 1895
EVENT
,
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, and the
1915
DATE
paper “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
.” Thus the unifying principle of the processes described above is to be sought in the interplay of relations between systems.
The problem that dominates the
third
ORDINAL
chapter of The Ego and the Id is this: from the historical point of
view the superego is inherited from parental authority, but from the
economic point of view it derives its energies from the id. How can this
be so? How can the internalization of authority be a differentiation of
intrapsychical energies? The intersecting of these
two
CARDINAL
processes, which methodologically belong to
two
CARDINAL
different planes, explains the following: what is sublimation in terms
of results and introjection in terms of method may be likened to a
regression according to the economic point of view. Therefore the
problem of the “replacement of an ob-ject-cathexis” by an identification
is taken, in its most general sense, as a sort of algebra of
placements, displacements, and replacements. So presented,
identification has rather the appearance of a postulate in the strong
sense of the term, i.e. a demand that must be accepted at the beginning.
Consider the following text:
When it happens that a person has
to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of
his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside
the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this
substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this
introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral
phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders
that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole
condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the
process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very
frequent
one
CARDINAL
, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a
precipitate [Niederschlag] of abandoned object-cathexes and that it
contains the history of those object-choices. <
136
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
136
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
257
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
29
DATE
.
DATE
Thus the abandonment of the desired object, which is the beginning of
sublimation, coincides with something like a regression. This is a
regression, if not in the sense of a temporal regression to an earlier
phase of the organization of the libido, at least in the economic sense
of a regression of object-libido to the narcissistic libido, considered
as a reservoir of energy. If the transformation of an erotic
object-choice into an alteration of the ego is indeed a method <
137
CARDINAL
> of dominating the id, the price to be paid is this: “When the ego
assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak,
upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by
saying: ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object.’ ” <
138
CARDINAL
>
<
137
CARDINAL
> I use the word “method” in the sense in which
Freud
ORG
uses it in
Chapter 3
LAW
, when he writes: “From another point of view it may be said that this
transformation [Umsetzung] of an erotic object-choice into an alteration
of the ego is also a method [ein
Weg
PERSON
] by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its
relations with it—at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large
extent in the id’s experiences” (
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
258
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
30
CARDINAL
).
<
138
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
We are prepared for the generalization which henceforth governs the problem:
The
transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus
takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a
desexualization—a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question
arises, and deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the
universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not take
place through the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual
object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to
give it another aim. <
139
CARDINAL
>
<
139
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
The only justification for this important hypothesis is that it
enables us to understand the following sequence: sublimation (as
regards the aim), identification (as regards the method), regression to
narcissism (as regards the economics of cathexes).
When we apply
this schema to the oedipal situation, identification takes on a
concrete historical meaning: that of the child’s identification with
“the father in his own personal prehistory.” To what extent does
Freud
ORG
succeed in integrating the identification with the father into the
theoretical schema of identification through the abandonment of
object-cathexes?
From the start
Freud
ORG
finds himself faced with the difficulty elaborated in
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego, namely, that the identification arising from
object-cathexis is preceded by “a direct and immediate identification
[which] takes place earlier than any object-cathexis.” Moreover, this
first
ORDINAL
identification is what explains the ambivalence of love and hate in the
child’s relationship to the father. The father is both the obstacle to
the boy’s desire for his mother and the model to be imitated. If
identification is not doubled in this way, the economics of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is unintelligible. Indeed, according to the schema of
identification through the abandonment of the object, what should be
expected is an identification not with the father but with the mother;
the mother is the object the boy abandons and therefore she must have
been the one he identified with.
Freud
ORG
admits that the facts do not seem to fit the theory. Consequently, what he calls the “complete
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex” can be accounted for only by assuming a double identification
—that is, by introducing into the conflict a confrontation between an
object-choice and an identification prior to any object-choice in such a
way that identification with the father presents itself as a double
identification, negative by rivalry, positive by imitation. To this must
be added the element of bisexuality, a theme going back to the time of
Freud
ORG
’s friendship with Fliess, if it is not simply taken from him.
Bisexuality requires each of these relations to be doubled again,
depending on whether the boy behaves like a boy or like a girl; that
makes “
four
CARDINAL
trends” which produce
two
CARDINAL
identifica-
86
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
259
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
31
DATE
.
87
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
88
CARDINAL
. Letter
113
CARDINAL
: “And I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which
four
CARDINAL
persons are involved
” (Origins, p. 289).
WORK_OF_ART
tions, a father-identification and a mother-identification, each of them being both negative and positive.
Have
we succeeded in making the genesis of the superego coincide with
identification through the abandonment of the object? It seems so at
first
ORDINAL
glance, and the following text, which
Freud
ORG
himself places in italics, appears to crown the success of the
interpretation: “The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated
by the
Oedipus
LOC
complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these
two
CARDINAL
identifications in some way united with each other. This modification
of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents
of the ego as an ego ideal or superego.”
89
CARDINAL
This precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes, by which an
object-choice becomes a modification of the ego, reminds us somewhat of
Kant
PERSON
’s notion of self-affection (
Selbst
PERSON
-affektion). The ego affects itself by its own renunciatory
object-choices. This modification of the ego is both a loss for the
id—the id lets go, it gets rid of its objects so that the ego may take
over— and at the same time an enlarging of the id, for the only way this
new formation can be adopted by the id is by making itself loved like
the lost object.
But the derivation of the superego from the
first
ORDINAL
object-cathexes of the id, from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex . . . brings it into relation with the phylogenetic
acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of former
ego-structures which have left their precipitates behind in the id. Thus
the superego is always close to the id and can act as its
representative [
Vertretung
ORG
] vis-a-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is.
Thus
all the scattered elements are brought together: father- or
mother-identification, modification of the ego through abandoned
objects, enlarging of primary narcissism into a secondary narcissism.
However
complicated this schema may be, it is still a long way from satisfying
all the requirements of the problem. Besides the fact
89
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
262
CARDINAL
; SE,
19, 34
DATE
.
90
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
278
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
48-49
DATE
.
that it leaves intact the distinction between identification
with the father or with the mother and object-relation (or again,
identification as the desire to be like and identification as the desire
to have), secondary identification itself raises a good many problems:
how can a precipitate of identification act as “opposition” to the ego?
How can the superego be both derived from the id and opposed to it and
its
first
ORDINAL
object-choices? We must introduce a further complication, that of reaction-formation. This process goes back to the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
and was invoked in the paper “On Narcissism” in order to criticize and propose an alternative to
Adler
GPE
’s notion of masculine protest and overcompensation. Its function is to
explain the superego’s double relationship to the Oedipus complex: the
superego arises from the Oedipus complex by borrowing its energy and
then turns back against it; the superego is therefore the heir to the
Oedipus complex in the double sense that it proceeds from it and
represses it. This double sense is implied in the expression of the
dissolution (
Untergang
GPE
) of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex: the dissolution refers to the exhaustion of a lapsed
organization of the libido (the phallic stage), but also to the
destruction, the disintegration, the demolition (
Zerstrummerung
PERSON
) of an object-cathexis. In order to account for this reaction-formation,
Freud
ORG
was led to underscore the aggressive and punitive character of the parental figure with which the ego identifies itself.
One year
DATE
after writing The Ego and the Id,
Freud
ORG
devoted a separate paper to
“The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
WORK_OF_ART
” in which he underscored the repressive function of this “precipitate of identification.” No doubt the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is destined to a natural death: it belongs to an organization
of the libido that will inevitably experience “disappointments” (the boy
will never have a child by his mother and the girl is rejected as a
lover by her father); moreover, it is bound to “pass away according to
program” (pro-gramgemass) when the libidinal organization to which it
corresponds gives way to the next phase of development. But what pre-
91
CARDINAL
. “Along with the demolition of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, the boy’s object-cathexis of his mother must be given up” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
260
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
32
CARDINAL
).
92
CARDINAL
. “
Der Untergang
PERSON
des
Odipuskomplexes
ORG
,”
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
393
CARDINAL
-402;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
173—79
CARDINAL
; translated in Collected Papers,
2
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
, as “
The Passing of the Oedipus Complex
WORK_OF_ART
.” cipitates the destruction of the phallic organization is the threat
of castration, which is preceded and prepared for by all the other
experiences of separation. Although the threat may have been uttered
prior to the phallic phase, it does not take effect until the stage when
the childhood theory about the loss of the penis in little girls offers
it quasi-empirical support.
By thus emphasizing the aggressive and severe character of the parental threat of punishment,
Freud
ORG
improves his interpretation on several counts. For
one
CARDINAL
thing, he strengthens the connection between narcissism and the giving
up of the libidinal cathexis of the parental object; indeed, it is in
order to save its narcissism that the child’s ego “turns away” from the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex (wendet sich vom
Odipuskomplex
ORG
ab). Thus this object-cathexis is “given up” and “replaced” by
identification. By connecting the abandonment of the object and
narcissism,
Freud
ORG
reinforces his theme: “The ego ideal is . . . the expression of the
most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the
id.”
Secondly
ORDINAL
, one sees more clearly that the superego is opposed to the rest of the
ego, for it “takes over” (entlehnt) the severity of the father and
perpetuates within the ego his prohibition against incest; one might
even say that the narcissistic interests and the voice of the superego
are in agreement on this point, since the threat of the superego
“secures” (versichert) the ego against the return of the libidinal
object-cathexis. Finally, to a certain extent this “destruction” enables
one
CARDINAL
to interrelate sublimation and repression, which the earlier texts had
set in opposition to each other. On the one hand, the destruction is a
kind of desexualization; it answers therefore to the definition of
sublimation (which is, as we know, a change not only of the object but
of the aim); the instincts are “inhibited in their aim” (zielgehemmt)
and changed into impulses of affection; then begins the latency period.
In generalizing these economic relations revealed by the destruction of
the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, one may say that desexualization and sublimation happen “with
every transformation into an identification.” On the other hand, there
is no reason for denying the name of repression to the ego’s turning
away from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, although later repressions proceed from the superego which it was the function of this repression to set up; how-
ever, it must be said that in the normal
Oedipus
LOC
complex this repression, having been successfully carried out, is
indistinguishable from a sublimation, since it “destroys” and
“abolishes” the complex. <
140
CARDINAL
>
<
140
CARDINAL
> I have omitted discussion of the feminine Oedipus complex, which
Freud
ORG
frequently dealt with: in The Ego and the Id,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
3
CARDINAL
; at the end of “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex”; in “
Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes
WORK_OF_ART
” (
1925
DATE
); in
“Feminine Sexuality”
WORK_OF_ART
(
1931
DATE
); and in
New Introductory Lectures
GPE
, Lecture XXXIII.
Have we reached our goal? Have we really shown “external” authority to be an “internal” difference?
The last chapters (
4
CARDINAL
and 5) of The Ego and the Id leave no doubt as to the inadequacy of the final results.
Identification
NORP
cannot bear the weight of the economics of the superego all by itself.
It is not enough simply to reinforce the difference that arises within
the id by an opposition or reaction-formation; we must also introduce a
factor of negativity—a factor taken from another instinctual source,
about which we have thus far said nothing and which
Freud
ORG
calls the death instinct. From now on it must be admitted that an
economics of the superego requires not only a revision of the
first
ORDINAL
topography and a new kind of differentiation of the libido, but also a
revision of the very bases of the instinct theory. We shall accordingly
bring the economic genesis of the superego to a halt at this threshold
where The Ego and the Id must give way to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
; we shall content ourselves with sketching this conjunction so as to
give some idea of the path that remains to be traveled. We shall assume
that the death instinct can operate either in “fusion” with
Eros
NORP
or in a state of “defusion”; <
141
CARDINAL
> the sadistic component of the libido would be an example of the
first
ORDINAL
mode of operation and the sadism that has become perversion an example of the
second
ORDINAL
mode; this would lead to the conjecture that regres-
<
141
CARDINAL
> Strictly speaking, the concepts of fusion (
Mischung
GPE
) and defusion (
Entmischung
PERSON
) apply only to the life and death instincts and their combination, according to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
; they do have a basis, however, in the conception of the libido (taken from the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
) as a loosely connected bundle of tendencies each of which is ready to
go off in a separate direction; in this conception there is clearly
foreshadowed the separating off of sadism.
sion to a former phase rests upon such a defusion of the instincts. If now we combine the differentiation of the
three
CARDINAL
agencies—ego, superego, id—with the defusion of the
two
CARDINAL
instincts
—Eros
LOC
and death—we catch sight of a new complication in the genesis of the
superego. Would not the cruelty of the superego, which we have stressed
ever since the descriptive and clinical stage of our investigation, be
another representative of the death instinct?
We are not yet in a
position to grasp the significance of this complete upheaval of the
psychoanalytic edifice; faced with the death instinct, the libido itself
reveals new dimensions and changes its name; from now on
Freud
ORG
will speak of
Eros
LOC
. What significance does this have for the pleasure principle, for
narcissism? Further, what is the relationship between the death
instinct, “by nature mute,” and all its representatives, in particular
its cultural or anticultural representatives? What relationship is there
between sadism and masochism and, within masochism itself, between
“moral” masochism, which will be spoken of in “
The Economic Problem of Masochism
WORK_OF_ART
,” and the other forms of masochism? We must indeed admit that the
theory of the superego remains incomplete as long as we have not
understood its “deathly” component.
95
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
275
CARDINAL
,
289
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
46
DATE
,
59
DATE
.
Chapter 3
LAW
: Illusion
It is difficult to pinpoint what is properly psychoanalytic in
Freud
ORG
’s interpretation of religion. However, it is essential to put into
sharp forcus those elements of his interpretation that merit the
consideration of both believers and unbelievers. There is a danger that
believers may sidestep his radical questioning of religion, under the
pretext that
Freud
ORG
is merely expressing the unbelief of scientism and his own agnosticism;
but there is also the danger that unbelievers may confuse
psychoanalysis with this unbelief and agnosticism. My working
hypothesis, stated in
the “Problematic
ORG
,” is that psychoanalysis is necessarily iconoclastic, regardless of the
faith or nonfaith of the psychoanalyst, and that this “destruction” of
religion can be the counterpart of a faith purified of all idolatry.
Psychoanalysis as such cannot go beyond the necessity of iconoclasm.
This necessity is open to a double possibility, that of faith and that
of nonfaith, but the decision about these
two
CARDINAL
possibilities does not rest with psychoanalysis.
Our procedure will be the same as with the analysis of the sublime. At the
first
ORDINAL
level, corresponding to what we called “the descriptive and clinical
approaches to the sublime,” we will try to delimit what properly
pertains to psychoanalysis and we will concentrate on
two
CARDINAL
themes, observances and illusions. Next we will enter into the “genetic
ways of interpretation” and take up the genesis of the gods at the
point where we left it in the preceding chapter; we will then attempt to
evaluate the significance of a strictly psychoanalytic phylogenesis of
religion. Finally, we will enter into the properly economic theme of the
“return of the repressed”: the entire psychoanalysis of religion is in
fact contained in this disclosure of the regressive nature of religion.
At the same time the cycle of fantasies will be closed off: from dreams
to esthetic seduction, from seduction to ethical idealization, from the
sublime to illusion, we
shall have returned to our starting
point, the quasi-hallucinatory fulfillment of desire. This will involve a
change of levels, however, for religion as illusion will no longer be a
private fantasy but a public illusion; between dreams and illusion we
will have to insert culture itself and understand how illusory
wish-fulfillment can operate on
two
CARDINAL
such different levels as the private dreams of
our nights
TIME
and the daydreams of peoples; the task of an economics of culture will
be to account for this return to the starting point of the spiral of
fantasies.
ILLUSION AND THE STRATEGY OF DESIRE
All of
Freud
ORG
’s comments about religion center around
two
CARDINAL
themes, both of them situated in the area of the analogy with neuroses and dreams. The
first
ORDINAL
theme concerns practices or observances; the
second
ORDINAL
concerns belief, that is to say, statements about reality. The
second
ORDINAL
theme, illusion, constitutes the theme proper to religion; but as the
first
ORDINAL
throws more light on the basically analogical character of the psychoanalytic approach to religion, we will begin with it.
This order is backed by the chronology of the texts, for
Freud
ORG
’s
first
ORDINAL
work on religion, written in
1907
DATE
, deals with the resemblance between
“Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices
ORG
.” Although this paper does not introduce the theme of illusion, it may
be said to contain in germ the entire later theory of religion. The
precise level of the comparison, as we must not forget in the later
discussion, is that of behavior and gesture, of acting (witness the
title itself).
Freud
ORG
finds a resemblance between two types of ceremonials, just as he had
previously found a resemblance between the dream-work and the mechanisms
of wit. This
first
ORDINAL
approach cannot go beyond a simple analogy; it will be precisely the
ambition of the great ethnological and historical constructs in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo and
Moses
PRODUCT
1
CARDINAL
. “
Zwangshandlungen
ORG
und
Religionsiibungen
ORG
” (
1907
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
129
CARDINAL
-39;
SE
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
117
CARDINAL
-27.
2
CARDINAL
.
H. L. Philp
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
and
Religious
GPE
Belief (
London
GPE
, Rockliff,
1956
DATE
), has strongly emphasized the analogical character of the psychoanalytic description of religion.
and Monotheism to ground the resemblance in an identity. But it is important to stay at
first
ORDINAL
on the level of the analogy and to realize that it works both ways; we must not forget that
Freud
ORG
was also the one who discovered that the neuroses have meaning and that
the ceremonials of obsessed persons have meaning. The comparison is
operative, therefore, from meaning to meaning. Hence it is both
legitimate and illuminating to point out the many clusters of
resemblance: the qualms of conscience brought on by an omission of some
ritual action, the need to protect the performance of the ritual against
any external interruption, the conscientiousness with regard to detail,
the tendency of ceremonials to become increasingly complicated,
esoteric, even petty. Moreover, in connection with ceremonials, an early
insight is gained into the depths of the “sense of guilt”:
ceremonials—and included here are acts of penitence and invocations—have
a preventive value with regard to an expected and feared punishment;
thus religious observances assume the meaning of “defensive or
protective measures.”
These analogies are all the more instructive in that their many meanings remain in suspense;
Freud
ORG
, of course, had no doubt that the meaning of faith is completely
exhausted in them; but that should not stop us. Even the famous formula
that will be the leitmotiv of the whole psychoanalysis of religion has
more than one
CARDINAL
meaning.
Freud
ORG
writes, “In view of these similarities and analogies one might venture
to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the
formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual
religiosity and religion as a universal neurosis.” This statement opens
as many things as it closes. It is an astonishing thing that man is
capable both of religion and of neurosis, in such a way that their
analogy can actually constitute a reciprocal imitation. As a result of
this imitation, man is neurotic insofar as he is homo religiosus and
religious insofar as he is neurotic. The problematic character of the
above formula is brought out by another closely related statement: “An
obsessional neurosis presents a travesty,
half
CARDINAL
comic,
half
CARDINAL
tragic, of a private religion.” Thus religion can be caricatured as neurotic ceremonial. Is this situation due
3
DATE
. “
Obsessive Actions
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
138
CARDINAL
-39;
SE
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
126
CARDINAL
-27.
4
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
132
CARDINAL
; SE,
9
CARDINAL
,
119
CARDINAL
.
to the underlying intention of religion, or is it the result
of its degradation and regression when it begins to lose the meaning of
its own symbolism? And how does the forgetfulness of meaning in
religious observances pertain to the essence of religion? Does it
pertain to a still more fundamental dialectic, the dialectic of religion
and faith? These questions necessarily remain as background, even
though
Freud
ORG
does not raise them himself.
Freud
PRODUCT
was bothered by
only one
CARDINAL
thing: the gap between the private character of the “religion of the
neurotic” and the universal character of the “neurosis of the religious
man.” The function of phylogenesis will be not only to consolidate the
analogy in an identity but to account for this difference on the level
of the manifest contents.
The
second
ORDINAL
clinical theme of
Freud
ORG
’s psychoanalysis of religion is that of illusion. Here it is even more difficult than with the
first
ORDINAL
theme to distinguish the specific contribution of psychoanalysis from
Freud
ORG
’s personal convictions. Yet it must be done, for it is here that the
problematic of religion is distinguished from that of the sublime.
For
Freud
ORG
, of course, ethics and religion have a common stem, the father complex
originating in the oedipal situation. In this sense the theory of
illusion is part of the theory of ideals and constitutes what might be
called the fantasy function of the superego—the factor of story-making
linked to the factor of prohibition. But the bifurcation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex into the ethical and the religious branches involves a distinction between
two
CARDINAL
processes, the in-trojection of ideals and the projection of
omnipotence, which latter will presently be at the center of the genetic
explanation. It is important therefore to grasp the meaning of this
distinction on the descriptive and clinical plane. There are in fact
two
CARDINAL
distinct problematics: ideals and illusion. Ideals represent an
internalization of authority in the impersonal manner of the imperative;
the existential index of the origin of authority has fallen away and
the imperative index alone has been retained, to the exclusion of the
indicative. The present problem, concerning religious belief regarded as
an illusion, is the positing in reality of figures like the father.
I am not unaware that to a large extent this problematic of illu-
BOOK
11
CARDINAL
. ANALYTIC
sion is not peculiar to psychoanalysis. It is not difficult to find in
Freud
ORG
’s statements the echo of a rationalism and scientism belonging to his
time and situation; according to that rationalism, any language that
does not give factual information is devoid of meaning. The
incompatability of religious dogma and the scientific mind condemns
religion beyond appeal: “There is no appeal to a court above that of
reason,” says
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
.
Freud
ORG
agrees; his insistent attack on religion is not based on
psychoanalysis. And yet there is a strictly analytic problem about
illusion; this problem concerns the deciphering of the hidden
relationships between belief and desire; the proper object of the
analytic critique of religion is the strategy of desire concealed in
religious assertions.
It is here that our
second
ORDINAL
problem is seen to have the same analogous texture as the problem of
observances. The essential characteristic of illusions is not their
similarity to error, in the epistemological sense of the word but their
relationship with other fantasies and their inclusion within the
semantics of desire. This properly analytic dimension of illusion was
very precisely delimited by
Freud
ORG
in Chapter 6 of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
: “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from
human wishes. . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion when a
wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing
so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself
sets no store by verification.” An illusion is constituted by this
complicity between wish-fulfillment and unverifiability. Thus the
difference between illusion and delu-
5
CARDINAL
. Die
Zukunft
GPE
einer
Illusion
GPE
(1927),
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
325
CARDINAL
-80; SE,
21
DATE
,
5
CARDINAL
-56. “Scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge
of reality outside ourselves. . . . Ignorance is ignorance; no right to
believe anything can be derived from it” (
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
345
CARDINAL
-46; SE,
21
DATE
,
31-32
DATE
).
6
CARDINAL
. “All I have done ... is to add some psychological foundation to the
criticisms of my great predecessors. . . . Nothing that I have said here
against the truth-value of religions needed the support of
psychoanalysis; it had been said by others long before analysis came
into existence. If the application of the psychoanalytic method makes it
possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion, tant
pis for religion; but defenders of religion will by the same right make
use of psychoanalysis in order to give full value to the affective
significance of religious doctrines” (
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
358
CARDINAL
,
360
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
35
DATE
,
37
DATE
).
7
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
353
CARDINAL
-54; SE,
21
DATE
,
31
CARDINAL
.
sion is only one of degree: in an illusion the conflict with
reality is hidden, in a delusion it is open; some religious beliefs,
Freud
ORG
remarks, are delusional in this sense.
A
second
ORDINAL
analogical pattern reveals itself as follows: just as religious
observances recalled the ceremonials of obsession, so too wishful belief
points to a wish-fulfillment on the model of dreams. As
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
forcefully states, “Here, too, wishing played its part, as it does in dream-life.” <
142
CARDINAL
> Illusions mark the point of return of fantasies toward their primal expression.
<
142
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
338
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
17
CARDINAL
.
The relation of religion to desire and fear is, of course, an
old theme: the peculiar role of psychoanalysis is to decipher that
relation qua hidden relation and to relate the deciphering process to an
economics of desire. The enterprise is both legitimate and necessary;
in conducting it psychoanalysis does not act as a variety of rationalism
but fulfills its proper function. The question remains open for every
man whether the destruction of idols is without remainder; this question
no longer falls within the competency of psychoanalysis. It has been
said that
Freud
ORG
does not speak of God, but of god and the gods of men; <
143
CARDINAL
> what is involved is not the truth of the foundation of religious
ideas but their function in balancing the renunciations and
satisfactions through which man tries to make his harsh life tolerable.
<
143
CARDINAL
>
Ludwig Marcuse
PERSON
,
Sigmund Freud
GPE
(
Rowohlts Deutsche Encyklopadie
PERSON
,
1956
DATE
), p.
63
CARDINAL
.
We must now see why the economics of illusion, even more than
the economics of the superego, requires the intermediate step of a
genetic, and more precisely of a phylogenetic model. We have already
stressed the sharp difference between the private religion of the
neurotic and the universal neurosis of religion, but there is another
difference which individual psychology is likewise unable to account
for. Between a dream fantasy—say the dream of animal phobia in the case
of little
Hans
NORP
—and the immense figure of the gods there is a huge gap in meaning; here the individual
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex is not enough. An
Oedipus
LOC
complex of the species is needed. The temporal span of history and the
long childhood of mankind are needed to account for the power,
solemnity, and sanc-
tity of religious phenomena—that is, in the language of
Moses and Monotheism
WORK_OF_ART
, for the “compulsive character that attaches to religious phenomena.”
That is why the same theme does not retain, from
1907 to 1939
DATE
, the same epistemological coefficient; in
1907
DATE
, it is an analogy whose final meaning remains indefinite; in
1939
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
claims it is a historically demonstrated identity. All the ethnological and historical investigations separating the
two
CARDINAL
texts have but one aim: to transform into an identity the double
analogy of religion with neurosis on the one hand and with oneiric
wish-fulfillment on the other.
THE GENETIC STAGE OF EXPLANATION:
TOTEMISM
ORG
AND MONOTHEISM
The genesis of religion differs from the genesis
of prohibitions in that it is the genesis of assertions about reality
and not simply the genesis of a psychical agency. That is why the
concept of projection has the same place in the genesis of religion as
the concept of introjection in the genesis of the superego. And it is
also the reason why we must go beyond totemism itself in order to grasp
the starting point of the process of projection.
In the
third
ORDINAL
essay of
Totem
GPE
and Taboo Freud reads the history of religions in a manner reminiscent of
Auguste Comte’s
PERSON
“law of the
three
CARDINAL
states”: “The human race, if we are to follow the authorities, have in the course of ages developed
three
CARDINAL
. . . systems of thought
—three
CARDINAL
great pictures of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific.” Why these
three
CARDINAL
stages? There is no doubt that from the beginning the choice of this
historical sequence is guided by psychoanalytic considerations; indeed,
these
three
CARDINAL
states correspond to
three
CARDINAL
exemplar moments in the history of desire: narcissism, object-choice, reality principle.
10
CARDINAL
.
Der Mann Moses
PERSON
und die monotheistische
Religion
ORG
,
GW
ORG
,
16
CARDINAL
,
101— 246
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
7
CARDINAL
-137. The
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
essays of this work appeared prior to
World War II
EVENT
in the review Imago (
1937
DATE
); the
third
ORDINAL
appeared in
London
GPE
in
1939
DATE
.
The intervention of psychoanalysis in the selection of the ethnological materials is quite evident. In order to establish the
first
ORDINAL
level of the correspondence between the history of religion and the history of desire,
Freud
ORG
must postulate a pre-animistic stage of animism, a stage described as
“animatism,” in which there is as yet no express belief in spirits and
therefore no projection into transcendent figures.
Freud
ORG
admits that the ethnological basis is slight, but this
first
ORDINAL
stage enables him to secure the correspondence between the
two
CARDINAL
series from the outset: “This first human
Weltanschauung
ORG
he boldly writes, “is a psychological theory.” In support of this assertion it is assumed that this
first
ORDINAL
world conception still finds expression
today
DATE
in magic.
Freud
ORG
posits that “magic is the earlier and more important branch of
animistic technique,” and magic is a technique of desire. This
technique, the main description of which is taken from
Frazer
GPE
, is, in its double form of imitative magic and contagious magic, a clear instance of what
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
and the theory of obsessional neurosis called the “omnipotence of
thoughts” or “overvaluation of mental processes”: “By way of summary,
then, it may be said that the principle governing magic, the technique
of the animistic mode of thinking, is the principle of the ‘omnipotence
of thoughts.’ ” As we have seen, this technique is the delayed evidence
of the primary process which was only postulated in
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. It is here that desires interfere with reality: the
quasi-hallucinatory satisfaction of desire marks the primitive
encroachment of desire upon reality; henceforth the true meaning of
reality is to be achieved in and through this false efficacy of desire.
This
parallel is not free from difficulties. The relationship between
narcissism and the omnipotence of thought is not very convincing; there
is, indeed, an overestimation of the ego’s value in narcissism, but not,
strictly speaking, an overvaluation of its effectiveness. Magical acts,
for their part, are more a relation to the world than to oneself; nor
is it clear what features of magical action
13
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
14
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
97
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
78
DATE
.
15
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
106
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
85
CARDINAL
. This expression was suggested to
Freud
ORG
by the “rat-man” (cf. “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” [
1909
DATE
],
GW
PERSON
,
7
DATE
,
450
CARDINAL
-53;
SE
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
233
CARDINAL
-36).
justify the affirmation that “in primitive men the process
of thinking is still to a great extent sexualized. This is the origin
of their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.” On the other hand, what
to me seems very penetrating in
Freud
ORG
’s initial insight is his view that the
first
ORDINAL
religious problematic is a problematic of omnipotence; it was only
natural for a psychoanalysis of religion to look for the equivalent of
this problematic in the interplay of desires.
Once granted the
series of equivalences—pre-animism, omnipotence of thoughts,
narcissism—upon which the theory is based, the law of development is
clear: essentially it consists in a displacement of that omnipotence
that
first
ORDINAL
belongs to desire. The spirits of animism, the gods of religion, bare
necessity according to the scientific view of the world—this progression
marks off another history, that of the libido, which starts from
narcissism, rises to the stage of objectivization characterized by
attachment to parents, and ends in genital maturity where the choice of
objects is adjusted to the rules and requirements of reality. The
parallel allows the corresponding history of religion to be regarded as
the history of a dispossession or renunciation of omnipotence. In this
sense, the history of religion marks the advance of
Ananke
PERSON
, necessity, which opposes human narcissism. But why isn’t this
abandonment a dispossession to the benefit of nature, to the benefit of
reality?
It is here that a new mechanism must be introduced, the mechanism of projection, patterned on paranoia.
Freud
ORG
does not give us a complete theory of projection here, but rather takes it up at the
16
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
109
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
89
DATE
.
17
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
109
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
90
DATE
.
18
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
113
CARDINAL
-15; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
92-94
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
worked out the theory of projection in the
third
ORDINAL
section of the
Schreber
PERSON
case. Cf. “Psychoanalytic Notes on an
Autobiographical Account
ORG
of
a Case of Paranoia
WORK_OF_ART
(
Dementia Paranoides
PERSON
)” (
1911
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
294-316
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
59-79
CARDINAL
. This text is his most important contribution to the study of
projection, and more precisely of projection in a religious theme.
However, in the picture proposed here of the genesis of paranoia, more
light is thrown on the function of projection than on its mechanism,
which remains puzzling for
Freud
ORG
himself. Its function is clear: if we assume that the initial core of the
Schreber
DATE
case is a homosexual impulse directed toward his father, and then, by a
process of transference, toward his doctor, the principal mechanisms
brought into play are “reversal into its opposite,” which transforms the
loved object into an object of hate and replaces the homosexual impulse
with a delusion of sexual persecution (emasculation fantasy), and
“projection,” which consists
point where it furnishes an
economic solution to a conflict of ambivalence comparable to the one we
discovered in the behavior of mourning. But whereas melancholia
introjects hate that was once
in the replacement of
Flechsig
ORG
(his physician) by “the superior figure of God” (SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
48
CARDINAL
). The economic function of this replacement is clear: the “theodicy”
that this figure inspires transforms the emasculation fantasy into a
feminine fantasy and makes the subject himself a redeemer through
voluptuousness: thus “his ego found compensation in his megalomania,
while his feminine wishful fantasy made its way through and became
acceptable” (p.
48
CARDINAL
). The function of projection is, therefore, reconciliation: “the ascent
from Flechsig” to God enables him “to become reconciled to his
persecution, ... to accept the wishful fantasy which had had to be
repressed” (p.
48
CARDINAL
). But the mechanism of projection is singularly more obscure than its role: the fact that
Flechsig
ORG
and “
Schreber
DATE
’s God” belong to the same class presupposes an identification followed by a division, in which the persecutor is divided into
two
CARDINAL
personalities, God and
Flechsig
PERSON
(not to mention the bipartitions of the divine figures themselves). “A
process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of
paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. Or rather,
paranoia resolves once more into their elements the products of the
condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious”
(p.
49
CARDINAL
). Nor does the remainder of the study further elucidate the mechanism.
Section III has a different preoccupation: the establishment of the
sexual etiology of paranoia. To do this, we must expose the erotic
component of social factors (social humiliation, etc.), connect this
erotic component to the narcissistic phase of object-choice, and thus
discover the “proposition” which the delusions of persecution
“contradict”; the original proposition is, “I (a man) love him (a man)”;
in persecution, it is transformed into “I do not love him—I hate him,”
which is
one
CARDINAL
of the
three or four
CARDINAL
possible ways in which the original proposition may be contradicted. With amazing skill,
Freud
ORG
thus places persecution among the various ways of contradicting the
original proposition: delusions of jealousy contradict the subject,
delusions of persecution the verb, erotomania the object, sexual
overvaluation the proposition as a whole. But just as he is about to
tell us the nature of the projection involved in the reversal into its
opposite,
Freud
ORG
admits his perplexity. We can, of course, describe projection:
The
most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia is the
the process which deserves the name of projection. An internal
perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a
certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an
external perception. In delusions of persecution the distortion consists
in a transformation of affect; what should have been felt internally as
love is perceived externally as hate. (p.
66
CARDINAL
)
But projection does not coincide with paranoia; its concept is
both narrower and wider; narrower because “projection does not play the
same part in all forms of paranoia” (p.
66
CARDINAL
); wider because “it makes its appearance not
mixed with love
and turns it back against the ego, paranoia projects the ego’s mental
processes outward. Thus spirits are created: they arise from the
projection into reality of our own psychical pro-
only in paranoia but under other psychological conditions as well” (p.
66)—
CARDINAL
for instance, when we attribute an external cause to our subjective
impressions. The net result is set forth in the following terms:
Having
WORK_OF_ART
thus been made aware that more general psychological problems are
involved in the question of the nature of projection, let us make up our
minds to postpone the investigation of it (and with it that of the
mechanism of paranoic symptom-formation in general) until some other
occasion; and let us now turn to consider what ideas we can collect on
the subject of the mechanism of repression in paranoia. I should like to
say at once, in justification of this temporary renunciation, that we
shall find that the manner in which the process of repression occurs is
far more intimately connected with the developmental history of the
libido and with the disposition to which it gives rise than is the
manner in which symptoms are formed, (p.
66
CARDINAL
)
Psychoanalysis is indeed more at ease with the mechanism of
repression than with the formation of symptoms by projection. It is in
fact on this occasion that
Freud
ORG
presents the clearest analysis of the
three
CARDINAL
phases of repression: fixation, anticathexis, and regression to the original point of the fixation (see above, p.
141
CARDINAL
, n.
58
CARDINAL
). Thus the clearest result of the analysis of the
Schreber
DATE
case concerns “the mechanism of repression proper which predominates in paranoia” (p.
68
CARDINAL
), namely, a preliminary fixation at the narcissistic stage and a
regression that is measured by “the length of the step back from
sublimated homosexuality to narcissism” (p.
72
CARDINAL
). As for symptom-formation,
Freud
ORG
himself warns us that we have no right to assume that it “follows the same path as repression” (.p.
65
CARDINAL
). We see the reason why: the return of the repressed is
one
CARDINAL
thing, projection another; "the delusional formation, which we take to
be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a
process of reconstruction” (p.
71
CARDINAL
). This process “undoes the work of repression” by restoring from
without, through the detour of externality or transcendence, the lost
objects. In conclusion,
Freud
ORG
says: “In paranoia this process is carried out by the method of
projection. It was incorrect to say that the perception which was
suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we
now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without. The
thorough examination of the process of projection which we have
postponed to another occasion will clear up our remaining doubts on this
subject” (p.
71
CARDINAL
).
Thus it cannot be said that the
Schreber
DATE
case explains projection; it
only marks
MONEY
off the boundaries of projection. It also leaves intact the question whether the genesis of this caricature of God which is “
Schreber
DATE
’s god” reveals the complete secret of “the forces that construct religions,” as the
Postscript
ORG
to the paper suggests. Man is capable of religion as he is of neurosis,
we said; let us add: he is capable of religion as he is of paranoia.
cesses, present as well as latent, conscious as well as unconscious. <144><145>
This proposition—which is considerable indeed—is not so much an answer that closes as a question that opens.
<
145
CARDINAL
> The connection is substantiated on the one hand by the role
attributed to ambivalence, the importance of which we saw in the
interpretation of taboo, and on the other hand by the affinity between
“spirits” and the dead; but we also know the seriousness of the
ambivalent emotional conflicts the death of loved ones reveals in those
who survive them.
It is true that projection does not account for the systematic character of animism, in the sense of the
first
ORDINAL
complete picture of the universe. Therefore we will invoke a subsidiary mechanism, <
146
CARDINAL
> taken here from the dream-work but also seen in paranoia—the
mechanism of secondary elaboration, or better, of secondary “revision” (
Bearbeitung
PERSON
). This rationalization, internal to the dream-work and aimed at giving
the dream an appearance of unity, connection, and intelligibility so as
to make it acceptable, has its religious counterpart in the work of
justification we call superstition. In both cases it is a matter of a
screen interposed between knowledge and reality, a provisional
construction which we must penetrate in order to reach the underlying
conflict. This apparent rationality is itself an instrument of the
strategy of desire, an additional factor of distortion. <
147
CARDINAL
>
<
146
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
116
CARDINAL
-19;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
-97.
<
147
CARDINAL
> In the last pages of the
third
ORDINAL
essay of
Totem
GPE
and Taboo Freud softens his pathological interpretation of animism
somewhat. “If we take instinctual repression as a measure of the level
of civilization that has been reached,” superstitious motives are at the
same time “disguises” for authentic factors of culture, especially
prohibitions; similarly, magical rationalization covers up various
esthetic and hygienic purposes.
Upon these basic
mechanisms—omnipotence of thoughts and projection of this omnipotence
into reality—are built the new mechanisms contemporary with the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex. <
148
CARDINAL
> The spe-
in animism. On the other hand, the ambivalence of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is akin to the ambivalence of which the paranoiac projection is a solution. In this way the transition between the
third
ORDINAL
and
fourth
ORDINAL
essays of
Totem and Taboo
ORG
is made secure.
cific contribution of totemism is the theme of
reconciliation. We recall that the ethnological core of this theme,
according to the
fourth
ORDINAL
essay of
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
, is constituted by the totem meal, which is the expression of the communion of god and the faithful.
Freud
ORG
tells us that this meal is the beginning “of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.” <
149
CARDINAL
> Thus far we have considered only those aspects of this institution
that are capable of being internalized in the form of an intrapsychical
agency; but what is the properly religious element in the totem meal?
Essentially it is the sense of guilt, which derives from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. From the initial nebula
three
CARDINAL
focal areas have been delineated: the institution of society arises
from the covenant between the brothers, and the institution of morality
from the deferred obedience that is the result of the covenant; as for
religion, it has taken over the guilt. From this point on we can define
religion as the series of attempts to resolve the emotional problem
posed by the murder and the guilt and to bring about a reconciliation
with the offended father. <
150
CARDINAL
>
<
149
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
171
CARDINAL
; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
142
CARDINAL
.
<
150
CARDINAL
> “All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same
problem. ... all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same
great event [Begebenheit] with which civilization began and which,
since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest” (
GW
PERSON
,
9
CARDINAL
,
175
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
145
CARDINAL
).
But that is not all. The totem meal enables us to add an additional feature to the picture.
Religion
ORG
is not only repentance, it is also the disguised remembrance of the
triumph over the father, hence a covert filial revolt; this filial
revolt is hidden in other features of religion, principally in “the
son’s efforts to put himself in the place of the father-god.” Among all
the son religions,
Christianity
ORG
clearly occupies a special place;
Christ
ORG
is the son who “sacrificed his own life and so redeemed the company of brothers from original sin.” In this sacrifice the
two
CARDINAL
features of ambivalence come together: on the one hand the guilt from
the killing of the father is avowed and expiated; but at the same time
the son himself becomes
the god, replacing the father religion
by a son religion. A clear expression of this ambivalence is the revival
of the totem meal in the
Eucharist
NORP
: its meaning is both the reconciliation with the father and the
substitution of the son for the father, with the faithful consuming the
son’s flesh and blood.
The striking thing about this history is
that it does not constitute an advance, a discovery, a development, but
is the sempiternal repetition of its own origins. Strictly speaking, for
Freud
ORG
there is no history of religion: religion’s theme is the
indestructibility of its own origins;20 religion is precisely the area
where the most dramatic emotional configurations are revealed as
unsurpassable. Its theme is preeminently archaic: it speaks of the
father and the son, of the killed and lamented father and of the
repentant son in revolt; as such it is the area of emotive repetition.
That is why in principle the gaps in this history are unessential.
Totem
GPE
and Taboo acknowledges
two
CARDINAL
of them:
Freud
ORG
admits that the transition from the totem to god involves “other
sources or meanings . . . upon which psychoanalysis can throw no light”;
this transition will be partly filled out in
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism. On the other hand the role of the mother-goddesses, which was already seen in the
Leonardo
GPE
in connection with the phallic mother, remains obscure: “I cannot
suggest at what point in this process of development a place is to be
found for the great mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have
preceded the father-gods.”
Freud
ORG
is much more interested in the repetitive aspect of religion.
Omnipotence of thoughts, paranoiac projection, displacement of the
father onto an animal, ritual repetition of the killing of the father
and of the filial revolt constitute the “indestructible” basis of
religion. It is understandable why
Freud
ORG
stated many times over that naive religion is the true reli-
26
CARDINAL
. “The memory of the
first
ORDINAL
great act of sacrifice thus proved inde-structable” (
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
182
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
151
CARDINAL
).
27
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
9
CARDINAL
,
177
CARDINAL
-78; SE,
13
CARDINAL
,
147
CARDINAL
; the humanization of the god figure, which had at
first
ORDINAL
been concealed in animal features, is already a return of the father figure, and one which poses a very complicated problem:
Freud
ORG
views this return as an outcome of the increased longing for the father
which arose when the fraternal clan, in order to survive, had to give
way to a patriarchal society.
gion; rational and dogmatic theology, far from bringing
religion into closer contact with reason and reality, can only be
rationalizations adding to the distortion.
It may come as a surprise, therefore, that
Freud
ORG
spent so much time and care composing a new history of origins, not at
the level of totemism, but monotheism, and more precisely the ethical
monotheism of the
Jewish
NORP
people. But we must not look to
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism for some sort of rectification of
Totem and Taboo
ORG
; it is rather a completion and reinforcement of the latter’s repetitive
and regressive theory. What is more, this book stands as an exorcism.
It marks the renouncement on the part of
Sigmund Freud
GPE
the
Jew
NORP
of the value that his narcissism could still rightfully claim, the value of belonging to the race that engendered
Moses
PERSON
and imparted ethical monotheism to the world. But if
Moses
ORG
is
Egyptian
NORP
and if
Yahweh
PERSON
is merely the sublime resurgence of the father of the horde, then there
is nothing left but to yield to harsh necessity, over against the
claims of narcissism and the pleasure principle. It should perhaps be
added that
Moses
PERSON
stood as a father image for
Freud
ORG
himself, the same image he had already encountered at the time of “
The Moses of Michelangelo
WORK_OF_ART
”; this
Moses
ORG
had to be glorified as an esthetic fantasy and liquidated as a religious fantasy. One can guess how must it cost
Freud
ORG
to run counter to
Jewish
NORP
pride at the very moment when the storm of
Nazi
NORP
persecution was breaking out, when his books were being burned and his
publishing house ruined, and when he himself had to flee
Vienna
GPE
and take refuge in
London
GPE
: all this must have been a terrible “work of mourning” for
Freud
ORG
the man.
What is the theme of
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism? Its theme concerns “important considerations regarding
the origin of monotheist religions in general.” In this book
Freud
PRODUCT
tries to make a plausible reconstruction of a murder that would be for monotheism what
the
29
PRODUCT
.
Das Unbehagen
ORG
in der
Kultur
PERSON
(
1930
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
431
CARDINAL
; Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
,
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
74
DATE
.
30
CARDINAL
. Moses and Monotheism begins with this grave declaration: “To deprive a
people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons
is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by
someone who is himself
one
CARDINAL
of them” (
Gif
PERSON
',
16
DATE
,
103
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
7
CARDINAL
).
31
DATE
.
Gif
PERSON
',
16
CARDINAL
,
113
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
16
CARDINAL
.
murder of the primal father had been for totemism, and which
would be a continuation, reinforcement, and amplification of the primal
murder.
. The book contains an impressive number of hazardous hypotheses. The
first
ORDINAL
hypothesis is that of an
Egyptian
NORP
Moses, adherent of the cult of Aten, a god who was ethical, universal,
and tolerant. Unfortunately, neither the presumptions derived from the
name of
Moses
PRODUCT
nor those suggesting the account of his birth, nor even the
Egyptian
NORP
origin of circumcision, furnish much support to the hypothesis of an
Egyptian
NORP
Moses.
The
second
ORDINAL
hypothesis is that of the monotheism of Aten, which is alleged to have
been constructed on the model of an uncontested ruler, the famous
Pharaoh Akhenaten
ORG
, and which
Moses
ORG
imposed upon the Semitic tribes. However, even supposing that neither the Aten religion nor the fascinating personality of
Akhenaten
ORG
has been overestimated, it is doubtful that they have any connection whatsoever with the
Hebrew
NORP
religion.
The
third
ORDINAL
hypothesis assumes that the “hero” Moses—in the sense of
Otto Rank
PERSON
, whose influence is considerable here—was killed by the people and that the worship of the god of
Moses
PERSON
was merged with the worship of
Yahweh
ORG
, a volcano god, who thus became the disguise behind which the
Mosaic
PRODUCT
god concealed his origin and the people tried to forget the murder of
the hero. Unfortunately, the hypothesis of Moses’ murder, suggested by
Sellin
PERSON
in
1922
DATE
in a completely different geographical and historical context, was
later abandoned by its author. It presupposes, moreover, that there were
two
CARDINAL
Moses
PRODUCT
,
one
CARDINAL
of the cult of Aten, the other of the cult of
Yahweh
PERSON
, a hypothesis that finds no support in the specialists.
The
fourth
ORDINAL
hypothesis assumes that the
Jewish
NORP
prophets engineered the return of the
Mosaic
PRODUCT
god, reenacting the traumatic event in the name of the ethical god. The return to the
Mosaic
PRODUCT
god would also be the return of the repressed trauma; we thus reach the
point where a reawakening on the plane of ideas coincides with a return
of the repressed on the emotional plane: if the
Jewish
NORP
people have given Western culture its model of self-accusation, it is
because their sense of guilt feeds on the memory of a murder they have
all along been trying to forget.
It is with this
fourth
ORDINAL
hypothesis that the mechanism of
Freud
ORG
’s thought is perhaps best revealed.
Freud
ORG
is completely uninterested in the development of religious sentiment. He has no interest in the theology of an
Amos
PERSON
or an
Osee
PERSON
, of an
Isaiah
PERSON
or an
Ezechiel
PERSON
, nor in the theology of
Deuteronomy
PERSON
, nor in the relation between prophet-ism and the cultural and
sacerdotal tradition, between prophetism and Levitism. The idea of the
“return of the repressed” enabled him to dispense with a hermeneutics
that would take the circuitous path of an exegesis of the texts and
rushed him into taking the shortcut of a psychology of the believer,
patterned from the outset on the neurotic model. But what is most
astonishing is the guiding idea of the enterprise itself. If
Freud
PERSON
entered on the path of historical reconstruction in an area in which he
was by no means a specialist (Moses and Monotheism represents merely a
fragment of a huge project in which
Freud
ORG
hoped to apply the psychoanalytic method to the entire
Bible
WORK_OF_ART
!), the reason is that the doctrine, as he saw it, demanded an actual
murder; for him, the transition to monotheism required <
151
CARDINAL
> the renewal of the killing itself, so that the father figure might
be strengthened and sublimated, the guilt increased, the reconciliation
with the father exalted, and later, in
Christianity
ORG
, the substitute figure of the son magnified.
<
151
CARDINAL
> “The killing of Moses by his
Jewish
NORP
people . . . thus becomes an indispensable part of our construction, an
important link between the forgotten event of primeval times and its
later emergence in the form of monotheist religions” (
GW
PERSON
,
16
DATE
,
196
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
89
CARDINAL
).
In this history of the return of the repressed,
Jewish
NORP
monotheism takes over where totemism left off. The
Jewish
NORP
people reenacted on the person of
Moses
ORG
, an eminent substitute for the father, the primal forfeiture. The killing of
Christ
ORG
is a further reinforcement of the memory of their origins, while the Passover restores
Moses
PERSON
to life. Finally, the religion of
St. Paul
GPE
completes this return of the repressed and relates it to its
prehistoric source by giving it the name of original sin: a crime was
committed against God and death alone could redeem it. At the same time
Freud
ORG
returns here to his early hypothesis of the revolt of the sons: the
Redeemer
ORG
had to be the main guilty party, the chief of the company of brothers, just like the rebel hero of
Greek
NORP
tragedy. “He was . . . the returned primal father of the primitive horde, transfigured and, as the son, put in the
place of the father.” This effect of reinforcement to which
Freud
ORG
attributes the transition from totem to god could only be obtained by the reenactment of a real murder.
That is why
Freud
ORG
is unwilling to minimize the historical reality of this chain of
traumatic events: “In the group [as in the individual] an impression of
the past is retained in unconscious memory traces” For
Freud
ORG
, “the universality of symbolism in language” is far more a proof of the
memory traces of the great traumas of mankind than an incentive to
explore other dimensions of language, the imaginary, and myth. The
distortion of those memories is the only function of the imaginary that
is explored. As for the inheritance itself, irreducible to any direct
communication, it is indeed embarrassing, but it must be postulated, if
we wish to bridge “the gulf between individual and group psychology
[and] deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic. ... If it
is not so, we shall not advance a step further along the path we entered
on, either in analysis or in group psychology. The audacity cannot be
avoided.” Thus it cannot be said that we are dealing here with an
accessory hypothesis;
Freud
ORG
sees it as one of the links that guarantee the cohesion of the system:
“A tradition that was based only on communication could not lead to the
compulsive character that attaches to religious phenomena”; there can be
no return of the repressed unless a traumatic event occurred.
THE ECONOMIC FUNCTION OF RELIGION
WORK_OF_ART
The
Freudian
NORP
interpretation of religion will provide us with a final occasion for
showing how hermeneutics and economics are interrelated in the
Freudian
NORP
metapsy-
33
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
16
CARDINAL
,
196
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
90
DATE
.
34
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
16
DATE
,
201
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
23
DATE
,
94
CARDINAL
.
35
CARDINAL
. The “evidential value [of these facts] seems to me strong enough for
me to venture on a further step and to posit the assertion that the
archaic heritage of human beings comprises not only dispositions but
also subject-matter—memory traces of the experience of earlier
generations. In this way the compass as well as the importance of the
archaic heritage would be significantly extended” (
GW
ORG
,
16
DATE
,
206
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
DATE
,
99
CARDINAL
).
36
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
16
DATE
,
207
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
DATE
,
100
CARDINAL
.
37
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
16
CARDINAL
,
208
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
23
DATE
,
101
CARDINAL
.
chology. In
Freud
ORG
’s later writings a new theme makes its appearance, the theme of culture, under which
Freud
ORG
groups together various notions—esthetic, ethical, religious—that a
phenomenology would split into different regions according to the
intentionality of the object. It is in his elaboration of the concept of
culture that
Freud
ORG
attempts to account for the economic function of religion. The
difference between neurosis as a private religion and religion as a
universal neurosis lies essentially in the transition from the private
to the public—a transition that has thus far remained unintelligible to
us. On the other hand, the successive displacements of the father figure
onto the totem, then onto spirits and demons, then onto the gods, and
finally onto the God of
Abraham
PERSON
,
Isaac
PERSON
, and
Jacob
PERSON
and the God of
Jesus Christ
PERSON
, force us to relocate the production of fantasies within a historical,
institutional, linguistic, and literary context which reveals the
distance between a mere dream fantasy and a cultural object. If, then,
the return of the repressed, taken on the collective scale, has an
economic function, it does so through this cultural function;
consequently we must elaborate the context in which the displacements of
omnipotence, the quasiparanoiac projection, the reconciliation with the
father, and the secret vengeance of the sons occur and become
meaningful.
We cannot adequately deal with the problem of culture
in this chapter. Following our method of successive readings, we will
say just enough about it to account for the religious problematic on the
level proper to our investigation at this point, the level of a
strategy of desire. Further on we will see the full meaning which a
meditation on the death instinct and on the struggle of
Eros
PERSON
against death has for culture itself, which is situated at the crossroads of the conflict between the giants
Eros
LOC
and
Thanatos
ORG
. For the present let us remain at this halfway station, which is precisely the level of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
.
What is culture? In the
first
ORDINAL
place let us say negatively that there are no grounds for
distinguishing between culture and civilization. This refusal to enter
into a distinction that is well on its way
38
CARDINAL
.
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
326
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
6
CARDINAL
: “and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization”; a similar remark is found toward the end of
Why War
EVENT
? (
1933
DATE
). The
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
chapters of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
are devoted to this “economics” of cultural phenomena in general.
to
becoming classical is very illuminating. It is not that there exists on
the one hand a utilitarian enterprise of dominating the forces of
nature, which would be civilization, and on the other hand a
disinterested and idealistic task of realizing values, which would be
culture; this distinction may be meaningful from a point of view other
than that of psychoanalysis, but it is no longer so once the decision
has been made to approach culture from the point of view of the
balance-sheet of cathexes and anticathexes of the libido. All the
Freudian
NORP
considerations of culture are dominated by this economic interpretation.
For
Freud
ORG
, the concept of culture represents partly the same thing as the concept
of the superego, partly something new and more extensive. As long as
its primary task is said to be the proscription of sexual or aggressive
desires that are incompatible with a social order, culture is just
another name for the superego; in economic language, culture implies
instinctual renunciations: we have only to recall the
three
CARDINAL
most universal prohibitions, against incest, cannibalism, and murder. That culture and the superego are here but
two
CARDINAL
names for the same reality is evidenced by the mechanism of introjection.
In passing,
Freud
ORG
adds
two
CARDINAL
complementary features. On the one hand, esthetic satisfaction assures a
better internalization of culture, experienced as a sublime desire and
not as a mere prohibition; on the other hand, the individual’s proud and
bellicose identification with his group, all of whose hatreds he
adopts, procures for him a narcissistic type of satisfaction which
counteracts his hostility to culture and reinforces the corrective
action of social models. But these
two
CARDINAL
satisfactions—esthetic and narcissistic—do not remove us from the
familiar context of the instincts that lie hidden behind every formation
of an ideal.
The point where we go beyond the classical analysis
of the superego is in seeing that culture, in addition to its function
of prohibiting and correcting, also has the task of protecting the
individual against the superior power of nature. Illusions, as we shall
presently see, are bound up with this latter task. The task breaks down
into
three
CARDINAL
themes: to lessen the burden of instinctual sacrifices imposed upon
men; to reconcile individuals to those renunciations that are
ineluctable; to offer them satisfactory compensations for those
sacrifices. These are what
Freud
ORG
calls “the mental assets of civilization,” and it is in these assets that we must search for the true meaning of culture.
That is about the extent to which
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
carries the analysis of the phenomenon of culture; Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
goes much farther, under the guidance of the death instinct; we shall
return to the death instinct when we resume the unfinished analysis of
the superego.
The properly economic significance of this cultural function comes into view when it is related to another of
Freud
ORG
’s familiar themes, that of the harshness of life. This theme is developed in several stages. It
first
ORDINAL
of all designates man’s natural helplessness in face of the crushing
forces of nature, sickness, and death. Next, it concerns man’s dangerous
situation among his fellow men (Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
will go rather far in the direction of the famous homo homini lupus;
man causes pain to his fellow man, exploits him as a worker, and
enslaves him as a sexual partner). But life’s harshness is also another
name for the helplessness of the ego in its primal situation of
subjection to its
three
CARDINAL
masters, the id, the superego, reality; the harshness of life is this
initial primacy of fear. To this threefold fear—fear of reality,
neurotic fear, fear of conscience
—Civilization
ORG
and Its
Discontents
ORG
will add a further trait: man is basically a “discontented” being, for
he cannot achieve happiness in a narcissistic manner and at the same
time fulfill the historic task of culture which his aggressiveness
impedes; this is the reason why man, threatened in his self-regard, is
so enamored of consolation. At this point culture steps in to meet man’s
appetite. The new face civilization turns to the individual is no
longer
one
CARDINAL
of proscription but of protection, and this benevolent visage is the visage of religion.
Thus,
from the economic as well as from the descriptive and genetic points of
view, religion is distinct from morality; its point of
39
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
331
CARDINAL
(der seelische
Besitz
PERSON
der Kultur);
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
10
CARDINAL
; similarly, further on: “For the principle task of civilization, its actual raison
d’etre
ORG
, is to defend us against nature” (
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
336
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
15
CARDINAL
).
40
CARDINAL
. The Ego and the Id, Ch.
5
CARDINAL
;
New Introductory Lectures
GPE
, No.
XXI
ORG
.
41
CARDINAL
. On the theme of the “harshness of life,” see also
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
337
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
16
CARDINAL
.
contact with man lies beyond man’s instinctual renunciations, at the level of the
three
CARDINAL
tasks we assigned to culture; it promises man alleviation of his
instinctual burden, reconciliation with his ineluctable fate, and
recompense for all his sacrifices. But this movement beyond renunciation
is also a return to the hither side of renunciation: for it is to man’s
desires that the consolation is addressed. Just as all the situations
of helplessness and dependency repeat the childhood condition of
distress, so too consolation proceeds by repeating the prototype of all
the figures of consolation, the father figure. It is because he is
forever helpless like a child that man remains stricken with longing for
the father. Faced with nature, the man-child conjures up gods in the
image of the father.
This benevolent figure is precisely what is
needed to fulfill the economic task we have just described. By
representing the hostile presence of nature in human form, man treats
nature as a being that can be appeased and influenced; by substituting
psychology for the science of nature, religion fulfills the deepest wish
of mankind. In this sense it may be said that desire is what creates
religion, even more than fear.
Thus the economic function of culture has enabled us to construct a psychoanalysis of
Providence
GPE
; the god capable of fulfilling this task must be a benevolent figure,
beyond all severity; if nature is to be proportionate to man’s desires,
it must be ruled by such a favorable, wise, and just will.
This direct deduction of what
Freud
ORG
believes to be the highest form of religion has an obvious advantage:
it brings to light, by a striking shortcut, the end moment of religion
as a return to the historical origins of the idea of God. The deity
again becomes a unique person; henceforth man’s relationship with him
can recapture the intimacy of the child’s relationship with his father.
Furthermore, it immediately places religion within a cultural context
and rescues it from the private circle of the individual’s neurosis;
religion springs from the same need as the other functions of culture:
from the necessity of defending man against the superior powers of
nature.
On the other hand, this direct deduction of monotheism, which
42
CARDINAL
. Ibid.,
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
352
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
30
CARDINAL
.
appears to do away with the long detour through the earlier
figures, from the totem animal to spirits and the gods of polytheism,
might give the impression that
Freud
ORG
substituted the motive of human helplessness for the father complex of
Totem
GPE
and
Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
. But this motive, considered alone, is “less deeply concealed” than the
father complex; it is necessary to point out the connecting links
“between the deeper and the manifest motives, between the father-complex
and man’s helplessness and need for protection.” In the language that I
have adopted, the hermeneutics of culture in psychoanalysis is always
the counterpart of an economics of desire: between the cultural function
of consolation as provided by religion and the concealed longing for
the father there exists the same relationship as between the manifest
and the latent content of dreams. The connection between the
two
CARDINAL
points of view is assured by the very meaning of the adult’s
helplessness, inasmuch as that helplessness is a continuation and
repetition of the helplessness of childhood. Man is “destined to remain a
child forever”; therefore he endows the unknown and fearsome powers
with the features of his father image.
Such is the specifically
psychoanalytic interpretation of religion: religion’s “hidden” meaning
is the sempiternal repetition of the longing for the father.
We
can now set within the framework of this economics the double analogy
that has guided us in the clinical description—the dream analogy and the
neurosis analogy. This analogy has become an identity; if religion has
no truth proper to itself, what is the source of its strength and
effectiveness? Religious ideas “are not precipitates of experience or
end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest,
strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their
strength lies in the strength of those wishes.” This underlying
identity, from the economic point of view, between illusion and dream
fantasy has an important corol-
43
CARDINAL
. On this confrontation with
Totem and Taboo
ORG
, cf.
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
, 344—46; SE,
21
DATE
,
22-24
DATE
.
44
DATE
. Ibid.
45
DATE
. Ibid.
46
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
367
CARDINAL
-68;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
42
CARDINAL
-45.
47
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
352
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
30
CARDINAL
.
lary, the consequences of which we shall draw when we discuss the meaning of the reality principle in
Freud
ORG
. If religion is wish-fulfillment, it is not in essence the support of
morality; indeed, history proves that “immorality has found no less
support in religion than morality has.” <
152
CARDINAL
> If that is so, a fundamental revision of the connections between
culture and religion is called for: if religion, as consolation,
ultimately has more connection with desires than with their prohibition,
it becomes conceivable that culture may outlast religion. In this
postreligious culture, cultural prohibitions would have merely a social
justification; laws and institutions would have only a human origin.
<
152
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
361
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
38
DATE
.
But, on the other hand, religion is not pure illusion, since it includes “important historical recollections.” <
153
CARDINAL
>
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism speaks in this sense of “what is true in religion.” <
154
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
’s insistence on the reality of these recollections provides a
historical basis for the analogy between religion and obsessional
neurosis. If the analogy of illusion and dreams is based on the
infantile character of the father complex, the analogy of religion with
neurosis has the same basis, if it is true that “a human child cannot
successfully complete its development to the civilized stage without
passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of greater and sometimes
of less distinctness.” <
155
CARDINAL
>
<
153
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
366
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
42
DATE
.
<
154
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
16
CARDINAL
,
230
CARDINAL
ff. (“
Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion
WORK_OF_ART
”) ; SE,
23
DATE
,
122
CARDINAL
ff.
<
155
CARDINAL
>
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
366-67
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
42
CARDINAL
-45.
This theme, clearly delineated in
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
, forms the guiding idea of
Moses
ORG
and Monotheism. It is particularly operative in the correspondence discovered by
Freud
ORG
between the phenomenon of latency belonging to neurosis and the
phenomenon of latency he thinks he has discovered in the history of
Judaism
ORG
, a latency extending from the killing of
Moses
ORG
to the reawakening of the
Mosaic
PRODUCT
religion at the time of the prophets. We thus hit upon the point of
intersection of the clinical description, the genetic explanation, and
the economic explanation: “Between the problem of traumatic neurosis and
that of
Jewish
NORP
monotheism there is . . .
one
CARDINAL
point of agreement: namely, in the characteristic that might be
described as ‘latency.’ ” This analogy,
Freud
ORG
notes, “is very complete, and approaches identity.” Once granted the
formula for the development of neurosis—early trauma, defense, latency,
outbreak of neurosis, partial return of the repressed—the comparison
between the history of the human species and that of the individual does
the rest:
Something occurred in the life of the human species
similar to what occurs in the life of individuals . . . here too events
occurred of a sexually aggressive nature, which left behind them
permanent consequences but were for the most part fended off and
forgotten, and which after a long latency came into effect and created
phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure and purpose.
Such
is the well-founded analogy upon which the psychoanalysis of religion
ends: it undoubtedly constitutes the most striking example of the
interaction, in
Freud
ORG
’s works, between the interpretation of dreams and neurosis and the
hermeneutics of culture. We will discuss its validity at the end of our “
Dialectic
NORP
.”
52
CARDINAL
. Moses and Monotheism,
GW
ORG
,
16
DATE
,
176
CARDINAL
-77; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
72
DATE
.
53
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
16
DATE
,
186
CARDINAL
; SE,
23
CARDINAL
,
80
CARDINAL
.
PART III:
EROS
ORDINAL
,
THANATOS
ORG
,
ANANKE
ORG
Thus far in our reading of
Freud
ORG
we have deliberately skirted the great upheaval brought to light in the celebrated essay of
1920
DATE
, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. This reworking is more extensive than the one that the
1914
DATE
paper, with its introduction of the concept of narcissism, had imposed
on the notions of subject and object and on the general economy of the
human psychism. The introduction of the death instinct into the theory
of the instincts is truly a recasting from top to bottom. It is a
revision that affects,
first
ORDINAL
, psychoanalytic discourse itself, such as we presented it in its
epistemology in Part I; then, by degrees, the interpretation of all the
signs that constitute the semantics of desire; and finally, the notion
of culture itself, the general picture of which we provisionally
sketched in Part II.
The new instinct theory questions the initial
Freudian
NORP
hypotheses and especially the conception of a psychical apparatus
subject to the constancy principle. We recall that, by postulating the
equivalence between the pleasure principle and the constancy principle,
Freud
ORG
thought he was placing psychoanalysis in the scientific tradition of
Helmholtz
PERSON
and
Fechner
GPE
.
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
could become accredited as a science thanks to the quasi physics of the
psychical apparatus and to the quantitative transcription of the
economic phenomena underlying the work of interpretation. In Part I we
showed that the insight proper to psychoanalysis lies elsewhere, in the
reciprocity between interpretation and explanation, between hermeneutics
and the economics; but at the same time we had to recognize that the
speculation based on the quantitative hypothesis is not in complete
harmony with the actual nature of analytical dis-
1
CARDINAL
. Jenseits des
Lustprinzips
ORG
,
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
3
CARDINAL
-69; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
7-64
DATE
.
course. The new instinct theory involves a type of speculation
about life and death that is far different from the quantitative
theory; it comes closer to the views of
Goethe
ORG
and romantic thought, and even of
Empedocles
GPE
and the great pre-Socratics. The very title Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
is warning enough that it is to this level—the level of the most
general hypotheses concerning the functioning of life—that the
conceptual revolution must be carried. In order to account for this
switch in tonality, this movement from scientism to romanticism, I have
placed Part III under the great emblematic titles of Eros, Thanatos, and
Ananke
PERSON
. In face of death, the libido changes meaning and receives the mythical name of
Eros
LOC
. And in face of the pair
Eros-Thanatos
NORP
, the reality principle, the opposite pole of the pleasure principle,
unfolds a whole hierarchy of meaning that goes under the equally
mythical name of
Ananke
PERSON
.
Our
first
ORDINAL
task will be to establish the great polarity present throughout
Freud
ORG
’s works, the polarity between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. This will be the object of the
first
ORDINAL
chapter. This antithesis is closely tied in with the initial
Freudian
NORP
hypotheses: constancy hypothesis and quantitative hypothesis,
representation of the psychism as a self-regulating apparatus, etc. The
tie between the pleasure principle and the constancy hypothesis is so
great that one may legitimately ask whether the questioning of the
initial hypotheses implies not only a “beyond the pleasure principle”
but also a “beyond the reality principle.” It is important therefore to
accurately locate the meaning of the reality principle and to see how
much the initial
Freudian
NORP
hypotheses allow its meaning to vary. Between the perceptual function,
which we have often seen associated with consciousness and the ego, and
resignation to the ineluctable, there is, no doubt, a rather
considerable margin of meaning. The question then will be to what extent
the new instinct theory succeeds in displacing the center of gravity of
the concept of reality from
one
CARDINAL
pole toward the other.
We will not be able to give a definitive
answer to this question until we have made a detailed interpretation of
the death instinct. Therefore we will reserve a new and final
examination of
Freud
ORG
’s notion of reality for
Chapter 3
LAW
, in which we will group together
some of the critical questions
raised by this new reading of the theory. Let us say immediately that
one should not expect too much from this rereading. For reasons bearing
closely on the reality principle’s critical function toward the world of
desire and illusion, the earliest formulation of the reality principle
is the one that will offer the most resistance to the doctrinal upheaval
caused by the introduction of the death instinct.
The object of
Chapter 2
LAW
will be to accurately describe the great hypotheses concerning life and
death. Part I has taught us that the speculative hypotheses in
Freudian
NORP
theory cannot be justified by themselves. Their meaning is determined
in the interplay between interpretation and explanation. The speculative
hypotheses are verified by their capacity to interrelate hermeneutic
concepts—such as apparent meaning and hidden meaning, symptom and
fantasy, instinctual representative, ideas, and affects—with economic
concepts, such as cathexis, displacement, substitution, projection,
intro-jection, etc. We have seen that the specificity of analytical
discourse ultimately lies in the relation between instinct as the
primary energy concept and instinctual representative as the primary
hermeneutic concept; such discourse unites the
two
CARDINAL
universes of force and meaning in a semantics of desire. Our
first
ORDINAL
question then is this: What happens to this discourse, this semantics
of desire, when a more romantic type of speculation about life and death
is joined to a more scientific type of speculation about the constancy
hypothesis and its psychological equivalent, the pleasure principle?
Part I of our “
Analytic
NORP
” affords us a good clue: an instinct is always a deciphered
reality—deciphered in its instinctual representatives. What are the
representatives of the death instinct? With this question a new phase of
the work of deciphering is opened and also a new relation between
desire and its signs. Starting from this new connection between
hermeneutics and economics we will be able to appreciate the scope of
the revolution that affects the fundamental hypotheses concerning the
functioning of life.
The instinct theory, as we said above, is
subjected to a thorough recasting. The revision of the basis of the
theory is presented to us in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. The revision of the upper reaches
of the theory is to be found in the theory of culture, which we presented in part in Part II of
the “Analytic”
EVENT
and which finds, if not its completion, at least an extensive development in Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
. <
156
CARDINAL
>
<
156
CARDINAL
>
Das Unbehagen
ORG
in der
Kultur
PERSON
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
421—506
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
64—145
MONEY
.
It is at the level of culture that the death instinct, the
“mute” instinct par excellence, makes its way into the “clamor” of
history. Thus the basic connection between the economics and the
hermeneutics of the death instinct is worked out in the metabiological
hypotheses of the
1920
DATE
essay and the metacultural theory of the
1929
DATE
essay. It is a
two
CARDINAL
-way connection. On the one hand, by ending his theory of culture on the clear note of war,
Freud
ORG
brings out the meaning of the death instinct. On the other hand, by
introducing the death instinct into the instinct theory, he can view the
meaning of culture as a unified endeavor to which are subordinated the
partial phenomena of art, morality, and religion: it is in relation to
the “battle of the giants,
” Eros and Thanatos
WORK_OF_ART
, that the enterprise of culture assumes its radical and global meaning.
The
new reading of the instinct theory requires that the esthetic, ethical,
and religious phenomena, which we considered individually in Part II,
must now be reread as a group. The previous reading was based on the
gradual extension of the model of dreams and the neuroses to all
cultural representations. Thus it was an analogical reading, with all
the fragmentary and inconclusive character of analogy, for the question
remained whether the differences were more significant than the
similarities. In placing the task of culture in the field of the
struggle between
Eros
LOC
and Thanatos,
Freud
ORG
raises his interpretation to the rank of a single and strong idea. Whereas the
first
ORDINAL
reading, fragmentary and analogical, characterized psychoanalysis as a discipline of thought, the
second
ORDINAL
reading, global and sovereign, characterizes it as a world view. After the analogy step by step, the gaze of the eagle . . .
At the same time, however, the
Freudian
NORP
doctrine clears the way for a more radical questioning which challenges
the most assured certitudes. These unresolved questions I would like to
group to-
gether in
Chapter 3
LAW
under the
three
CARDINAL
headings: What is negativity? What is pleasure? What is reality?
3
CARDINAL
. “We would readily express our gratitude to any philosophical or
psychological theory which was able to inform us of the meaning [die
Bedeutungen
ORG
] of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure [Lust und
Unlust-empfindungen] which act so imperatively upon us. But on this
point we are, alas, offered nothing to the purpose. This is the most
obscure and inaccessible region of the mind, and, since we cannot avoid
contact with it, the least rigid [lockerste] hypothesis, it seems to me,
will be the best” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
3
CARDINAL
-4; SE, 18,1).
Chapter 1
LAW
:
The Pleasure Principle
ORG
and
the Reality Principle
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
WORK_OF_ART
—this means, in
1920
DATE
, the introduction of the death instinct into the theory of the instincts. Yet
Freud
ORG
’s doctrine always had a “beyond the pleasure principle,” namely, the
reality principle. It is impossible therefore to judge the extent of the
revolution imposed by the death instinct on the theory of the instincts
without
first
ORDINAL
setting up the very
first
ORDINAL
polarity, that of pleasure and reality.
Freud
ORG
’s concept of reality is less simple than it appears. Its development may be outlined as follows:
1
CARDINAL
. At the start, the
two
CARDINAL
principles of “mental functioning,” to use the language of an important short paper of
1911
DATE
, are coextensive with what was described as the “primary process” and the “
secondary
ORDINAL
process.” As we have already analyzed the meaning of these expressions,
we will content ourselves with translating that analysis into the terms
of the opposition that interests us here. Thus the initial concept of
reality is
first
ORDINAL
of all elaborated in the clinical context of the theory of the neuroses and of dreams; the metapsychological papers of
1914-17
DATE
enlarge this concept of reality by giving it an economic meaning in accord with the meaning assigned by the
first
ORDINAL
topography to the notions of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious;
in general, reality is the correlate of the function of consciousness.
By thus moving from a descriptive and clinical meaning to a systematic
and economic meaning, we transcribe the initial concept into a new key
without actually transforming it.
2
CARDINAL
. A further enrichment of the reality principle is found in the
investigation of the object-relation; we still remain at the level of
the
first
ORDINAL
theory of instincts (opposition between sexual instincts and
ego-instincts) and of the
first
ORDINAL
topography (representation of the psychical apparatus as a series of places: unconscious, precon-scious, conscious).
3
CARDINAL
. A more decisive transformation of the notion of reality occurs in connection with the
two
CARDINAL
important revisions of the theory considered in previous chapters: the introduction of narcissism and the switch to the
second
ORDINAL
topography. For different but convergent reasons, these
two
CARDINAL
revisions find expression in a progressive dramatization of the
opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The
real is no longer simply the contrary of hallucination; it is harsh
necessity, as revealed after the abandonment of narcissism and after the
failures, deceptions, and conflicts which culminate in the Oedipus
period. At this point reality is called necessity, and at times even
Ananke
PERSON
.
The great “remythicizing” of the instinct theory, which we will consider in the following chapter and which is symbolized by
Eros
PERSON
and death, will play an important part in this process of dramatization; we will leave the
Freudian
NORP
notion of reality at this threshold, returning to it at the end of our
study on death. Thus, we will speak of the reality principle at
two
CARDINAL
different times: before the death instinct and after the death
instinct. The transition from a “scientific” picture of the psychical
apparatus to a more “romantic” interpretation of the interplay of love
and death cannot help but affect the meaning that the notion of reality
acquires in
Freud
ORG
’s theory. Prior to the death instinct, reality is a regulative concept
on the same level as the pleasure principle; that is why it too is
called a “principle.” After the death instinct, the notion of reality
becomes charged with a meaning that raises it to the level of the great
quasi-mythical forces that divide up among themselves the empire of the
world. This transfiguration will be symbolized by the term
Ananke
PERSON
, which calls to mind not only the notion of “destiny” in
Greek
NORP
tragedy, but also that of “nature” in
Renaissance
ORG
philosophy and in
Spinoza
GPE
, as well as of the
Nietzschean
NORP
“eternal return.” In short, what at
first
ORDINAL
was merely a principle of “mental regulation” now becomes the cypher of a possible wisdom.
THE
REALITY
ORG
PRINCIPLE AND THE SECONDARY PROCESS
That
Freud
ORG
’s remarks about reality began with clinical observations is beyond
question. We are reminded of this fact by the opening lines of the short
paper of
1911
DATE
, “
Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning
WORK_OF_ART
.” As
Pierre Janet
PERSON
observed, neurotics manifest a loss of “la fonction du reel” [“the function of reality”];
Freud
ORG
differs somewhat from
Janet
PERSON
by maintaining that neurotics turn away from reality because they find
it unbearable. Thus at the beginning no special philosophical meaning is
attached to the concept of reality. Reality does not pose a problem, it
is assumed as known; the normal person and the psychiatrist are its
measure; it is the physical and social environment of adaptation.
Still,
even on this elementary level it is important to note the lack of
homogeneity in the opposition between pleasure and reality. To make the
opposition homogeneous, it must be assumed from the start that the
pleasure principle interferes with reality as the source of fantasies.
Acute
GPE
hallucinatory psychosis (
Meynert
PERSON
’s amentia) supplies the initial schema, <157><158> which
Freud
ORG
extends to all the neuroses:
Freud
ORG
posits that “in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.” <
159
CARDINAL
> This extension to the neuroses of a schema originally meant for the
interpretation of psychosis is based on an early thesis we have already
examined—in the neuroses and dreams wish-fulfillment operates in a
hallucinatory manner. Start-
<
157
CARDINAL
> “Formulierungen iiber die zwei
Prinzipien
PERSON
des psychischen
Gesche
ORG
-hens,”
GW
PRODUCT
,
8
DATE
,
230
CARDINAL
-38;
SE
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
218
CARDINAL
-26; Collected Papers,
4
CARDINAL
,
13-21
DATE
. Cf.
Jones
PERSON
,
The Life and Work of Freud
WORK_OF_ART
,
2
CARDINAL
, 312—15.
<
158
CARDINAL
> The
first
ORDINAL
formulation of the
two
CARDINAL
principles is found in
Letter
GPE
105
CARDINAL
to Fliess: “My last generalization holds good and seems inclined to
spread to an unpredictable extent. It is not only dreams that are
fulfillments of wishes, but hysterical attacks as well. This is true of
hysterical symptoms, but it probably applies to every product of
neurosis—for I recognized it long ago in acute delusional insanity.
Reality—wish-fulfillment: it is from this contrasting pair that our
mental life springs”
(The Origins of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
, p.
277
CARDINAL
). Cf.
Jones
PERSON
,
1
DATE
,
398
CARDINAL
.
<
159
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
230
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
218
CARDINAL
.
ing from this initial nucleus, the task may be reasonably
proposed “of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics
and of mankind in general to reality, and in this way of bringing the
psychological significance of the real external world into the structure
of our theories.”
The correlation between the pleasure principle and the quasi-hallucinatory function of desire is the basis of the process that
Freud
ORG
, during the period of
the “Project” and Chapter 7 ol
ORG
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, called the “primary process”; it also enables him to correlate the reality principle with the secondary process. These
two
CARDINAL
correlations serve as the guiding thread in the remainder of the
1911
DATE
paper, although additional themes are indicated which are unintelligible except in relation to the
second
ORDINAL
topography.
The connection between the primary and secondary processes is not a simple one; it reveals
two
CARDINAL
kinds of relations between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle. On the one hand, the reality principle is not truly the
opposite of the pleasure principle but a detour or roundabout path to
satisfaction. The psychical apparatus has in fact never functioned
according to the simple schema of the primary process; the pleasure
principle, considered in its pure state, is a didactic fiction.
Correlatively, the reality principle designates the normal functioning
of a psychical apparatus governed by the secondary process. On the other
hand, however, the pleasure principle prolongs its reign by assuming
many types of disguises. It is the pleasure principle that animates the
whole of fantasy existence in all its normal and pathological forms,
from dreams to ideals to religious illusions. Taken thus in its
disguised forms, it appears quite impossible to go beyond the pleasure
principle. From this standpoint the reality principle designates an
order of existence difficult to attain.
In our study of
the “Project”
ORG
we mentioned the various reasons why the pleasure principle, taken
absolutely, is a fiction that has never been the actual condition of
man. For
one
CARDINAL
thing, the internal instincts always break the equilibrium and make the
total discharge of tensions impossible; the psychical apparatus is thus
forced to de-
4
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
viate from the simple energy functioning represented by the constancy principle.
Secondly
ORDINAL
, the experience of satisfaction inevitably involves the help of others,
object-relations, and consequently the whole circuit of reality. We
recall this striking text of
the “Project”:
EVENT
At early stages the human organism is incapable of achieving this
specific action. It is brought about by extraneous help, when the
attention of an experienced person has been drawn to the child’s
condition by a discharge . . . This path of discharge thus acquires an
extremely important secondary function—viz., of bringing about an
understanding with other people; and the original helplessness of human
beings is thus the primal source of all moral motives.
Finally, unpleasure, according to another formula of
the “Project,”
ORG
is “the sole means of education”: unpleasure gives a hedonistic sense
to the reality principle itself and sets it within the prolongation of
the pleasure principle. As a matter of fact, hallucinatory satisfaction
is a biological impasse and would inevitably lead to failure; hence, the
setting up of the reality principle is demanded by the pleasure
principle itself.
If then the reality principle coincides with
the secondary process, every human psychism, so far as it escapes
hallucination, obeys that principle.
The
third
ORDINAL
part of the “
Project
WORK_OF_ART
” presents a schematic account of the secondary process understood in
the above sense; in this account the reality principle is maintained
within the limits of what might be called a calculated or rational
hedonism; this schematic picture of the secondary process will never be
basically altered. We are acquainted with its main themes: qualitative
reality-testing (to which
the “Project”
ORG
assigned a special group of neurons), discrimination between
hallucination and perception, attentive exploration of new stimuli;
identification of new stimuli with earlier ones by means of judgment
(according to a schema close to perceptual judgment in
Kant
PERSON
); the movement from observed reality to thought-reality, on the basis of the mnemic traces of heard speech; motor or
5
CARDINAL
. Origins, p.
379
CARDINAL
.
6
CARDINAL
. Ibid., p.
428
CARDINAL
.
muscular domination over reality; control of the delay of discharge with a view toward ideation, etc.
Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams
LAW
adds nothing to this schematic analysis of the secondary process; we
have even been able to say that, for reasons of structure stemming from
the overall intention of the work,
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
does not go as far as
the “Project
ORG
.”
The main themes of
the “Project”
ORG
are taken up again in the
1911
DATE
paper in the
first
ORDINAL
of its
eight
CARDINAL
paragraphs devoted to the reality principle. <
160
CARDINAL
> Once again attention is conceived as anticipated adaptation; memory
as the integration of notations of the past; judgment as the comparison
and identification between new qualities and memory traces; motor
domination as the tonic binding of energy. Finally, the restraint upon
motor discharge by means of the process of thinking has the same role as
in the “
Project
WORK_OF_ART
”; it may even be said that the text of
the “Project”
ORG
is in every regard the more explicit of the
two
CARDINAL
.
The analysis of the reality principle would be incomplete if
we restricted ourselves to this conception of the secondary process,
whose contrary remains a theoretical construct. But
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
already showed, in an inverse manner, why one cannot go beyond the
pleasure principle. The psychical apparatus, it will be remembered, was
pictured as capable of functioning in either a progressive or a
regressive direction. This schematic diagram, in many respects a
misleading one, at least suggests the notion of a psychism operating in
reverse, a psychism that resists the substitution of the reality
principle for the pleasure principle. Hence the pleasure principle no
longer designates merely an earlier
Active
NORP
stage, but the reverse movement of the apparatus—what
Chapter 7
LAW
called the topographical regression or the tendency of the psychical
apparatus to restore the primitive form of hallucinatory
wish-fulfillment. Thus
Freud
ORG
was able to define a
Wunsch
GPE
, which we translate approximately as “desire,” as the tendency to restore the hallucinatory form of fulfillment:
As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time
this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which
will
seek to re-cathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke
the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of
the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a
wish [Wunsch]\ the reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of
the wish [
Wunscherfiillung
PERSON
]; and the shortest path to the fulfillment of the wish is a path
leading direct from the excitation produced by the need to a complete
cathexis of the perception. Nothing prevents us from assuming that there
was a primitive state of the psychical apparatus in which this path was
actually traversed, that is, in which wishing ended in hallucinating.
Thus the aim of this first psychical activity was to produce a
“perceptual identity”—a repetition of the perception which was linked
with the satisfaction of the need.
This shortest path to
fulfillment is no doubt closed to us, but in a figurative and substitute
mode it is the path we take in all forms of fantasying; neurotic
symptoms, our dreams at night, and our daydreams are evidence of the
supremacy of the pleasure principle and the proof of its power.
From this
second
ORDINAL
point of view, while the pleasure principle represents an actual mode
of functioning, the reality principle expresses an aim or task to be
achieved. The difficulty of that task is stressed in the remainder of
the analysis; the pleasure principle is less costly; the reality
principle implies the giving up of the short circuit between desire and
hallucination.
This dramatic relation is summed up very briefly in the
second
ORDINAL
paragraph of the
1911
DATE
paper:
A general tendency of our mental apparatus, which can be
traced back to the economic principle of saving expenditure [of energy],
seems to find expression in the tenacity with which we hold onto the
sources of pleasure at our disposal, and in the difficulty with which we
renounce them. With the introduction of the reality principle
one
CARDINAL
species of thought-activity was split off [wurde eine
Art Denkbarkeit
PERSON
abgespalten]; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure princi-
pie alone. This activity is fantasying [
Phantasieren
ORG
], which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as daydreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.
Behind these brief remarks must be placed everything that
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
says about the indestructibility of
one
CARDINAL
’s earliest desires, about man’s inability to move from a rule of
fantasy to a rule of reality—in short, everything that makes the human
psychism a Thing and justifies the appeal to a topography. The path to
reality is indeed the more difficult path. Many allusions, both in
the “Project”
EVENT
and in the present paper, imply that reality is actually reached only through thought devoted to scientific work.
Such is, from
the “Project” of 1895
EVENT
to the article of
1911
DATE
, the conception of the double functioning of the psychical apparatus.
Freud
ORG
will make additions to this conception but basically he will not alter it.
The “Papers on Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
merely present a topographical and economic translation of it, harmonizing it with the
first
ORDINAL
schematic picture of the psychical apparatus that we have called the
first
ORDINAL
topography.
Thus, in the paper “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
,” the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle is incorporated into the great oppositions between the
“systems” (Ucs., Pcs.,
Cs
PERSON
.). This translation deserves our attention, since for the
first
ORDINAL
time it makes it possible to relate the reality principle to the system
Cs
PERSON
. and to define reality as the correlate of consciousness.
This “systemic” translation occurs in the section called
“The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs.
WORK_OF_ART
” The pleasure-unpleasure principle is classified with exemption from
contradiction (no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty), the
mobility of cathexes, and timelessness. Inversely, the reality principle
is classified with negation and contradiction, the tonic binding of
energy, and reference to time.
10
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
11
CARDINAL
. “To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process
(mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by
psychical reality—these are the characteristics which we may expect to
find in processes belonging to the system Ucs.” {
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
286
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
187
CARDINAL
).
Of all
Freud
ORG
’s theoretical writings,
the “Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams
LAW
” (
1916
DATE
) <
161
CARDINAL
> contains the most exact formulation of this correlation between the system
Cs
PERSON
. and the reality principle.
Correcting Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams
LAW
,
Freud
ORG
admits that the topographical regression—that is, the resolution of
wishful thoughts into mnemic images derived from earlier experiences of
satisfaction, and the revival of those images —does not adequately
account for the belief in reality that accompanies hallucination.
Flallucination further requires the abolition of the discriminating
function of perceptual judgment; hence this discriminating function must
be connected with some special psychical institution, with some
“contrivance [Einrichtung] with the help of which it was possible to
distinguish such wishful perceptions from a real fulfillment [von einer
realen
Erfiillung
PERSON
] and to avoid them for the future.” <
162
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
calls the function that hallucination abolishes “reality-testing” (
Realitdtspriifung
PERSON
) , <
163
CARDINAL
>
<
161
CARDINAL
> “
Metapsychologische Erganzung
ORG
zur
Traumlehre
PERSON
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
412
CARDINAL
-26;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
222—35
CARDINAL
; Collected Papers,
4
CARDINAL
,
137
CARDINAL
-51.
<
162
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
422
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
231
CARDINAL
.
<
163
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
In investigating this function we are led to say that
one
CARDINAL
and the same system regulates the process of becoming conscious and
reality-testing. To discriminate between what is internal and what is
external pertains to a single function, a function obviously connected
with muscular action, for it is by such action that objects are made to
appear and disappear. Thus
one
CARDINAL
may speak of a single system
Cs.-Pcpt
ORG
., which has its own cathexis or charge capable of resisting libidinal
invasion. Reality-testing is thus intimately linked with the system
Cs
PERSON
. and its peculiar cathexis.
Freud
ORG
states, “We shall place reality-testing among the major institutions [
Institutionen
ORG
] of the ego, alongside the censorships which we have come to recognize between the psychical systems.” <
164
CARDINAL
> The censorships that accompany reality-testing are the ones that protect the systems Pcs. and
Cs
PERSON
. against libidinal cathexes; they are the ones that give way in wishful
psychosis by a “turning away” (Abwendung) or “withdrawal” (
Entziehung
PERSON
) from reality, or in the state of sleep by a “voluntary
renunciation.” The narcissistic flight into sleep is thus equivalent to a loss of cathexis on the part of the system
Cs
PERSON
. <
165
CARDINAL
>
<
165
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
425
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
234
DATE
.
Every topographical regression, characteristic of the loss of
the function of reality, supposes therefore an alteration of the system
Cs
PERSON
. itself. But
Freud
ORG
openly admits that the topographic-economic theory of the system
Cs.-Pcpt
PERSON
. remains to be constructed. Once again the doctrine does not come to
decisive conclusions but rather sets the framework for investigation.
Our whole previous discussion concerning consciousness as the “surface”
of the psychical apparatus (along the lines of
Chapter 2 of The Ego
LAW
and the Id) belongs to this investigation of the system
Cs.-Pcpt
PERSON
., which we now know is the counterpart to any study of the reality principle. When
Freud
PERSON
says that the system
Pcpt
PERSON
. is the nucleus of the ego, <
166
CARDINAL
> he is in fact stating the reality principle. Thus we can now erect
the great function of “externality” over against the demands, ethical as
well as instinctual, of the internal world; later on, when we have
introduced the superego into the confrontation with reality, we will be
able to say with The Ego and the Id:
<
166
CARDINAL
> “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
” speaks along the same lines: “We shall count it [conscience], along
with the censorship of consciousness and realitytesting, among the major
institutions of the ego” (
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
433
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
247
CARDINAL
).
Whereas the ego is essentially the representative
[Reprdsentant] of the external world, of reality, the superego stands in
contrast to it as the representative [
Anwalt
WORK_OF_ART
] of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the
ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the
contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the
external world and the internal world. <
167
CARDINAL
>
<
167
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
264
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
36
DATE
.
THE
REALITY
ORG
PRINCIPLE AND “OBJECT-CHOICE”
The pleasure principle is the short and easy path; everything regressive leads back to it. The reality
principle is the long and hard path; it entails renunciation and mourning over archaic objects.
This
simple schematic picture was developed, without basic alteration, by
all the analyses concerning what we have frequently called the history
of desire. This schematic “chronology” of desire will reveal further
relationships between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
In his
first
ORDINAL
theory of the libido
Freud
ORG
limited the investigation of the instincts to the domain of the sexual
instincts, provisionally opposed to the ego-instincts; thus he delimited
the area in which the conflict between the
two
CARDINAL
principles of mental functioning especially occurs. The replacement of
the pleasure principle by the reality principle is not accomplished all
at once, nor does it take place simultaneously all along the line of the
instincts: the domain of the libido is the one in which the change of
regime occurs with most difficulty. The libido remains under the
dominance of the pleasure principle longer than any other instinct
because primitive autoerotism enables it for some time to escape the
experience of frustration and, consequently, education by means of
unpleasure, and also because the period of latency further delays the
confrontation with reality until puberty. Sexuality is thus the seat of
archaism, whereas the ego-instincts are directly at grips with the
resistances of the real. The pleasure principle continues its dominance
mainly in the region of fantasy, where the structure of
Wunsch
GPE
lasts the longest, perhaps even indefinitely. We have often underscored
this specificity of the semantics of sexual desire; unlike hunger or
even the defense of the ego, sexuality gives rise to imagination and to
speech, but in an unrealistic mode; at this point the semantics of
desire is a semantics of delusion. That is why the reality principle is
seen as the outcome of a battle which takes place no longer merely in
the substructures of desire but in the numerous branchings of the realm
of fantasy, on the plane of what
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
” call the “offshoots” or “derivatives” of instinct, in all the areas of
ideas, affectivity, and the spoken expressions of desire.
In his theory of the “stages” of the libido
Freud
ORG
attempted to
19
CARDINAL
. “Formulations on the
Two
CARDINAL
Principles of Mental Functioning,”
GW
WORK_OF_ART
,
8
DATE
,
234
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
222
CARDINAL
.
highlight the main steps of this history of desire in which
the battle between fantasy and reality takes place. By thus
interrelating what he calls in the
1911
DATE
paper “the supersession of the pleasure principle by the reality
principle” <168><169> and the theory of stages, he
establishes an interesting connection between the reality principle and
“object-choice,” which forms the central theme of the history of the
libido. This connection is more precise and illuminating than the
connection we established above between the reality principle and the
secondary process.
<168>
Ibid
PERSON
, (die
Ablosung
ORG
des Lustprinzips durch das Realitatsprinzip).
<
169
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
99
DATE
,
109
CARDINAL
,
139
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
199
CARDINAL
(
1915
DATE
),
207
CARDINAL
(
1905
DATE
),
237
CARDINAL
(
1905
DATE
).
The point of departure is found in an important remark in
the Three Essays on Sexuality
ORG
to the effect that an instinct has a specific “aim” but variable
“objects.” This original tendency toward deviation on the part of desire
is what prolongs the rule of the pleasure principle. Since the relation
to the object is not given, it has to be acquired; this problem is
designated in the analytic doctrine by the term
Objektwahl
ORG
, object-choice, and constitutes the central theme of the theory of the libidinal stages.
Placed
within this precise perspective, the reality principle coincides with
the institution of the genital stage, and still more precisely, with the
subordination of object-love to procreation. On this point
Freud
ORG
never varied; he assumes that there is a correspondence between the
reality principle and a specific intrapsychical organization—a form of
“organization and subordination to the reproductive function.” To this
repeated statement of the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays21
NORP
there corresponds a similar statement of the
1911
DATE
article: “While the ego goes through its transformation from a
pleasure-ego into a reality-ego, the sexual instincts undergo the
changes that lead them from their original auto-erotism through various
intermediate phases to object-love in the service of procreation.” <
170
CARDINAL
> Thus, reality resides in the relation to the other, not only to
another body as an external source of pleasure, but to another desire,
and finally to the fate of the species. In the area of the sexual
libido, the reciprocal relation between complementary partners of the
same species and the submission of the individual to the species are
decisive for the
<
170
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
237
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
224
CARDINAL
.
supremacy of the reality principle. The basic contribution of
psychoanalysis in this regard is to have shown that this conquest of the
most highly complex form of organization is difficult and precarious,
not by reason of chance social conditioning, but by reason of a
structural necessity. This is what distinguishes
Freud
ORG
from all cul-turalists who seek to trace the difficulty of living back
to the circumstances of the existing social environment. For
Freud
ORG
, the successive phases of sexuality are tenacious and hard to
“abandon”; thus the pathway to reality is marked off with lost objects,
the
first
ORDINAL
of which is the mother’s breast; auto-erotism itself is partly linked
with this lost object. Consequently, “the choice of an object” has a
nature that is both prospective and nostalgic: “The finding of an object
is in fact a refinding of it.” For the libido, the future is in the
past, in “the happiness that has been lost.”
Freud
ORG
often stated that object-choice has, so to speak, no choice; by a kind
of inner fate it will pattern itself on the model of the person’s own
body or on that of the one who was responsible for the child’s care: it
will be narcissistic or anaclitic.
This dramatic interpretation
of the history of desire reaches its climax with the Oedipus complex,
which concerns our present investigation by reason of the numerous
fantasies it gives rise to. The oedipal crisis is not localized in time;
it continues to come to the surface in the form of incestuous fantasies
in dreams and the neuroses.
Freud
ORG
’s insistence upon the incestuous nucleus of neurosis is well known; it
is the point, he says, on which psychoanalysis stands or falls. But the
essence of the oedipal drama is itself fantasy; it is a drama enacted
and dreamed. Yet it is all the more serious a drama, for it stems from
an impossible request on the part of desire. Desire began by wishing for
the impossible (a situation which the doctrine expressed in terms that
shocked and scandalized: the son wishes to have a child by his mother,
and the daughter by her father); because
23
CARDINAL
.
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
,
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
ff. (die
Objekfindung
PERSON
);
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
222
CARDINAL
ff,
24
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
25
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
26
CARDINAL
. Ibid. Footnote added in
1915
DATE
;
Freud
ORG
thus harmonizes his text with the discoveries made in
Section II
PRODUCT
of the paper “
On Narcissism
WORK_OF_ART
,” in which are differentiated “
two
CARDINAL
methods”—anaclitic and narcissistic—of “finding an object.”
it
wished the impossible, desire was necessarily disappointed and wounded.
Hence the path to reality is not only lined with lost objects but with
forbidden and refused objects as well. Enough has been said about the
importance of these abandonments and renunciations in the formation of
the superego; we must now speak of their effect on the reality
principle.
In
the article of 1911
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
distinguishes the reality-ego from the pleasure-ego (
Lustich
GPE
). <
171
CARDINAL
> If desire or wishing (Wunsch) is the central drive of the
pleasure-ego, the striving for the useful is the central drive of the
reality-ego: “Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish
[wiinschen] ... so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what
is useful and guard itself against damage.” <
172
CARDINAL
> Here
Freud
ORG
stands on familiar ground. The early
Socratic
NORP
dialogues revolve around the meaning of the useful. Nor should the
Kantian
NORP
critique conceal the positive significance of this reflection upon the useful; by opposing the useful to the deceitfulness of
Wunsch
GPE
,
Freud
ORG
restores to the useful its role as an indication of reality. This
opposition subsumes, at a more complex level of elaboration, the
opposition we previously found between the primary and the secondary
processes. On the one hand, the useful is the truth of the pleasurable;
it is the true pleasurable substituted for the dreamed pleasurable. In
this sense, the reality principle is indeed the safeguard of the
pleasure principle: “Actually the substitution of the reality principle
for the pleasure principle implies no deposing [
Absetzung
GPE
] of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding [Sicherung] of it.”
<173> On the other hand, the pleasure-ego has so many tricks in
its bag, so many ramifications on the plane of the derivatives from the
unconscious, that respect for the useful, however modest its claims may
be from the standpoint of ethics, already appears as a form of
discipline.
<
171
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
235
CARDINAL
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
223
CARDINAL
.
<
172
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
173
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
The corrective value of the useful becomes evident as soon as
one
CARDINAL
considers that desire or wishing is the infinite source of fantasies
and the springboard of illusions. Desire mystifies; the reality
principle is desire demystified; the giving up of archaic objects is
now expressed in the exercise of suspicion, in the movement of disillusion, in the death of idols.
Here
the “ethnographical” history of desire cuts across and enriches the
“psychological” history of desire. It cuts across it insofar as one can
make an exemplary history of belief coincide with a history of the
stages of the libido. We recall the terms in which
Freud
ORG
attempted to effect this coincidence in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo: to the auto-erotic stage would correspond the omnipotence of
thoughts, characteristic of pre-animism and the techniques of magic; to
object-choice would correspond the dispossession of the omnipotence of
thoughts to the profit of demons, spirits and gods; to the genital stage
of the libido would correspond the recognition of the omnipotence of
nature. But this ethnographical history of desire, however fanciful it
may be, not only cuts across the history of the stages of the
organization of the libido, it also adds to it the essential theme of
omnipotence. This theme is the “religious” nucleus of the pleasure
principle; there is an element of “evil infinitude” in desire; the
reality principle—even when stated in the seemingly philistine form of
the utility principle—basically expresses the loss of the “evil
infinitude,” the reconversion to the finite.
That is why
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
could say that the dispossession of desire’s “omnipotence” to the profit of the gods already expresses the
first
ORDINAL
victory of the reality principle. From this point of view, myths
present an imaginary expression of this substitution, or, as the
1911
DATE
paper says in its
fourth
ORDINAL
paragraph, “a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind.” It could be said, in paradoxical terms, that for
Freud
ORG
religion marks the victory of the reality principle over the pleasure
principle, but in a mythical mode; thus religion is at once the supreme
figure of the abandonment of desire and the supreme figure of the
fulfillment of desire.
For
Freud
ORG
the analyst and scientist—I do not return to the difficulty of distinguishing between
Freud
ORG
’s personal “prejudice” and the positive achievement of psychoanalysis
in this critique of religion—it is science alone that completely
satisfies the reality principle and assures the triumph of the useful
over the pleasurable, of
the reality-ego over the pleasure-ego. Science alone triumphs
over the substitute figures, increasingly complicated and sublimated, in
which the pleasure-ego pursues its dream of omnipotence and
immortality.
Thus the reality principle is not completely
victorious until the adult is capable of giving up not only lost archaic
objects of the narcissistic or anaclitic type, not only forbidden
objects of the incestuous type, but also mythical objects, through which
desire pursues satisfaction in the substitute mode of compensation or
consolation. The reality principle might be said to symbolize the access
to true utility through the long detour of “mourning” over lost,
forbidden, and consoling objects.
I do not argue the point that
Freud
ORG
’s “scientism” reduced his vision of reality to observable facts, nor
that his critique of idols led him to overlook other dimensions of
reality. This narrowness of the
Freudian
NORP
theory is of less importance to me at this stage of reflection than the
role he assigns to mourning over the lost object and its derivatives.
This loss or renunciation, together with all the pruning it involves of
the realm of fantasy, turns the theme of reality toward that of
necessity.
Other aspects of the theory, and its entire later development, strengthen this alliance between reality and necessity.
THE
REALITY
ORG
PRINCIPLE AND THE ECONOMIC TASK OF THE EGO
The connection we
have established between the ego-agency and the reality principle opens a
final field of exploration for us. If reality is that which stands over
against the ego, in the topographical sense of the word, then
everything that concerns the “economic task of the ego” also concerns
the reality principle.
Do we run the risk of dissipating the
concept of reality by overextending it? Not if we keep as our guiding
thread the differentiation between the “internal” and the “external.” To
each new com-
plexity of the “internal world” there corresponds a new task for the ego as the representative of the external world.
Freud
PRODUCT
enriched this world of interiority in
two
CARDINAL
different ways:
first
ORDINAL
, by the revision of the instinct theory, that is, by the introduction of narcissism;
second
ORDINAL
, by the change from the
first
ORDINAL
to the
second
ORDINAL
topography (ego, id, superego). By these
two
CARDINAL
paths he entered more deeply into the unfathomable depths of
interiority; at the same time he increasingly dramatized the relation to
reality.
Narcissism directly concerns the relation to reality,
inasmuch as self-attention is inattention to the other. In the language
of the metapsychology, this inaccessibility to the other is expressed by
saying that narcissism is the “reservoir” of libido. According to this
economy of narcissism, each object-cathexis is a kind of provisional
affective investment. Our loves and hatreds are the revocable figures of
love derived from the undifferentiated substrate of narcissism: like
the waves of the sea, these figures may be effaced without alteration of
the substrate. The possibility of sublimation, it will be remembered,
stems from the constant return to the “egoistic” libid-inal substrate;
because of this return we can abandon aims and transform abandoned
object-choices into “modifications of the ego”; because of it,
consequently, our successive identifications form a precipitate that may
be likened to a secondary narcissism by reason of the economic
relations between identification, sublimation, desexu-alization, and
narcissism.
Thus is deepened an ever richer and more articulated
interiority. The counterpart to this indirect reinforcement of
narcissism is, of course, a lack of self-detachment in our consideration
of the world. Here we encounter a striking analysis that
Freud
ORG
made in the short paper entitled
“A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis”
WORK_OF_ART
: narcissism opposed acceptance of the discoveries of
Copernicus
GPE
, for they stripped us of the illusion of being at the center of the universe; it opposed
Darwin
PERSON
’s evolutionist theories, which plunge us into the vast flux of life;
finally, it resists psychoanalysis because the latter shakes the primacy
and sovereignty of consciousness. A new aspect
32
CARDINAL
. “Eine Schwierigkeit der
Psychoanalyse
PERSON
” (
1917
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
3-12
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
17
CARDINAL
,
137
CARDINAL
-44.
of the conflict between the pleasure principle and the
reality principle is brought to light: narcissism interposes itself
between ourselves and reality; that is why the truth is always wounding
to our narcissism.
These remarks about the power of narcissism to
resist truth are greatly corroborated by all that we know about the
internal world we call the superego (indeed, the concept of secondary
narcissism relates the superego to the primordial inner world or primary
narcissism).
Freud
ORG
did not explicitly treat of the relations between the superego and
reality. However, he invites us to explore this path when he states, in
The Ego and the Id, that “the superego is always close to the id and can
act as its representative vis-a-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into
the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego
is.” The last pages of that essay, devoted to “the dependent
relationships of the ego,” are a
first
ORDINAL
contribution to this research and foreshadow what a post-
Freudian
NORP
school calls “ego-analysis.”
Freud
ORG
’s succinct analyses begin by recalling certain functions that have
since become classic: order in time, reality-testing, motor inhibition
and control; but from now on these functions are considered from the
standpoint of the ego’s strength and weakness. Thus it is tempting to
consider reality as the correlate not only of the ego but of the ego’s
strength: reality is that which stands over against a strong ego. We
thus come back to what seemed to us to constitute the specific
problematic of the ego, namely, the problematic of domination and
slavery, as in
Spinoza
GPE
’s Ethics.
The strength of the ego, however, in distinction to the illusory omnipotence spoken of in
Totem
GPE
and Taboo, essentially consists in its conciliatory or diplomatic
position. In mediating between the id and the superego, between the id
and reality, and between the libido and the death instinct, “it only too
often yields to the tempta-
33
DATE
. In the language that we shall use in
the “Dialectic” (Ch
LAW
.
2
CARDINAL
): the false
Cogito
PERSON
is what interposes itself between us and reality; it blocks our
relation to the world, it prevents us from letting reality be as it is.
If there is, as I believe, a fundamental
Cogito
PERSON
, it is first necessary to abandon the position of this screen-cogito, of this resistance-cogito, in order to reach the
Cogito
PERSON
that founds in proportion as it lets be.
34
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
278
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
48-49
DATE
.
tion to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a
politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular
favor.” But this temptation is proper to a mediatory creature, more
courtier than arbiter, which must make itself be loved by the id to make
the id pliable to the world’s order, and which, like a theatrical
valet, courts its master’s love in order to moderate it. Otherwise the
ego would fall under the blows of the superego and once again become
prey to the death instincts in their striving to dominate the libido.
A
new meaning of the reality principle, intimated rather than expressly
formulated, is proposed. I will call it the “prudence” principle, in the
full
Aristotelian
NORP
sense; it is opposed to the false idealism of the superego, to its
destructive demands, and in general to all the exaggerations of the
sublime and to the bad faith of the good conscience.
This
prudence principle, which I would like to regard as the culmination of
the reality principle, is in sum the ethics of psychoanalysis. In the
text we have just commented on,
Freud
ORG
expressly compares the economic task of the ego to that of the analyst:
“In point of fact [the ego] behaves like the physician during an
analytic treatment: it offers itself, with the attention it pays to the
real world, as a libidinal object to the id, and aims at attaching the
id’s libido to itself.” The same line of thought is found toward the end
of Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
, where
Freud
ORG
, after having argued that the excessive demands of the superego cannot
effectively change the ego, adds: “Consequently we are very often
obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the superego, and we
endeavor to lower its demands.”
This comparison between the
economic task of the ego and the task of psychoanalysis itself is
instructive. It may be said that to the patient, the psychoanalyst
represents the reality principle in flesh and in act. He does so,
however, in proportion as he refrains from judgment and ethical
prescription. This abstention from all moral preaching, this analytic
detachment, would at
first
ORDINAL
lead
one
CARDINAL
to sup-
35
CARDINAL
. The Ego and the Id,
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
286
CARDINAL
-87;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
56
DATE
.
36
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
Italics
ORG
added.
37
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
503
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
143
CARDINAL
.
pose an absence of ethics. But such detachment becomes deeply
meaningful when it is placed within the field of the opposition between
the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The superego attacks
man for being a creature of pleasure, but it demands too much of man and
conceals its excesses only by offering the ego the narcissistic
satisfaction of being able to think itself better than others; the
regard of the analyst, on the contrary, is a regard that has been
educated to reality and turned back upon the inner world. Thus the
epoche or suspension of value judgments becomes the basic step toward
self-knowledge; it is the step that enables the reality principle to
gain control of the process of becoming conscious.
Has the whole
of ethics been abandoned? The analyst, more than anyone, knows that man
is always in an ethical situation; he presupposes this fact at every
step; what he says about the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex forcefully attests to the moral destiny of man. However,
confronted with the fumbling maneuvers of conscience and its strange
complicity with the death instinct, the reality principle proposes the
substitution of a neutral regard in place of condemnation. There is thus
opened up a clearing of truthfulness, in which the lies of the ideals
and idols are brought to light and their occult role in the strategy of
desire is unmasked. This truthfulness is undoubtedly not the whole of
ethics, but at least it is the threshold. No doubt psychoanalysis gives
only knowledge, and not veneration. But why should this be asked of it?
It does not offer it.
38
CARDINAL
.
Jean Nabert
PERSON
, Elements pour une ethique (
Paris
GPE
,
P.U.F.
DATE
,
1943
DATE
),
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
11
DATE
,
“Les sources de la
ORG
veneration.”
Chapter 2
LAW
: The Death Instincts: Speculation and Interpretation
FREUDIAN SPECULATION ON LIFE
AND DEATH
WORK_OF_ART
What are the representatives of the death instinct? The question arises for
two
CARDINAL
reasons.
First
ORDINAL
, it should be noted that the death instinct was not introduced to
account for the factor of destructiveness, as the later papers on
culture and especially
Civilization and Its Discontents
LAW
might lead us to believe, but to account for a set of facts which
center around the compulsion to repeat. It is only afterward that the
switch is made from metabiological to metacultural considerations. Thus
the connection between the various representatives of the death instinct
poses a question. More important, however, is the fact that the link
between this instinct and its representatives is not
Freud
ORG
’s main concern. Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
is the least hermeneutic and most speculative of
Freud
ORG
’s essays; in saying this I refer to the enormous part played in that
essay by hypotheses, by heuristic constructs, which are pushed to their
extreme consequences. The death instinct is not at
first
ORDINAL
deciphered in its representatives, but instead is posited as a
hypothesis or “speculative assumption” about the functioning and
regulation of the psychical processes. It is only in a
second
ORDINAL
movement that this instinct is recognized and de-
1
CARDINAL
. “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the
reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual
predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea
consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
23
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
24
CARDINAL
). Further on: “For the moment it is tempting to pursue to its logical
conclusion the hypothesis that all instincts tend towards the
restoration of an earlier state of things” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
39
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
37
DATE
).
ciphered in a certain number of clinical phenomena, and then, in a
third
ORDINAL
movement, recognized and deciphered as destructiveness, on the
individual plane and on the historical and cultural planes. Thus we must
always bear in mind that there is an excess of hypothesis compared with
its fragmentary and partial verifications.
Let us closely follow the steps in which the concept of death is introduced in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
.
The speculative side of the notion is evident from the
first
ORDINAL
lines of the essay and even from the title. The concept is not posited in opposition to
Eros
LOC
. On the contrary,
Eros
PERSON
will itself be introduced as a revision of the libido theory, a
revision imposed by the introduction of the death instinct. As the title
suggests, the hypothesis of the death instinct is concerned with the
limits of validity (
Jenseits
PERSON
. . . ,
Beyond
ORG
. . .) of the pleasure principle. By the same stroke the essay links up with the earliest set of hypotheses, those of the
1895
DATE
“Project.” Whereas the notion of libido stems from the deciphering of
instincts in their representatives, the pleasure principle belongs to
another type of hypotheses which
Freud
ORG
calls the “theory of psychoanalysis.”
These hypotheses, we
recall, concern the automatic regulation of the psychical processes.
They refer to an apparatus that functions on the pattern of an energy
system: the apparatus is set in motion by a production of tension and
tends to the general lowering of those tensions. This hypothesis is a
quantitative one in that the phenomena of pleasure and unpleasure are
related to the quantity of excitation present in the mind, unpleasure
corresponding to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure
to a diminution. <
174
CARDINAL
> There are therefore
two
CARDINAL
hypotheses. The
first
ORDINAL
concerns the correspondence between feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and the increase in the quantity of excitation; the
second
ORDINAL
concerns the effort of
<
174
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part I,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
. In the
first
ORDINAL
chapter of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, after having recalled these hypotheses,
Freud
ORG
goes on to say that there is no simple relation between the strength of
the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and the corresponding
modifications in the quantity of excitation, and that a temporal factor
must be considered: “The factor that determines the feeling is probably
the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a
given period of time” (
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
4
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
8)
DATE
. On this point, cf. “Project,”
The Origins of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
, pp. 371—72.
the psychical apparatus to keep the quantity of
excitation present in it as low as possible, or at least to keep it
constant. The
second
ORDINAL
hypothesis concerns the work of the psychical apparatus and its
direction; it is identical with the hypothesis of constancy; the
first
ORDINAL
hypothesis enables us to transcribe the hypothesis of constancy into
the pleasure principle and to say that “the pleasure principle follows
from the principle of constancy.”
But how is it possible to speak
of a “beyond the pleasure principle,” if the hypothesis of constancy is
the most general hypothesis that can be formed about the psychical
apparatus? Just what does the expression “beyond the pleasure principle”
refer to? It refers to the “operation [
Wirksamkeit
PERSON
] of tendencies . . . more primitive than [the pleasure principle] and
independent of it.” The whole course of the essay is a sustained and
skillful movement aimed at uncovering those tendencies. By skirting the
reader’s resistances and prudently laying siege,
Freud
ORG
lines up facts that could indeed be explained by the pleasure principle
but which could also be explained in some other way. Strangely enough,
Freud
ORG
decisively undermines the dominance of the pleasure principle at the
very moment he says it might adequately explain the facts. Thus
considerations must be brought forward to show that one cannot account
for man’s psychical life without mentioning the factors that oppose this
principle of constancy, that prevent it from being dominant and
restrict it to the role of being a tendency (
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
).
The surprising thing is that the pleasure principle can only rule over the primary processes, that is, according to
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, over the short circuit between wishes and their quasi-hallucinatory
fulfillment. When faced with difficulties from the external world the
pleasure principle is inefficient and even dangerous. Under the
influence of the ego’s instincts of selfpreservation, it is replaced by
the reality principle. Thus we have a strange situation: the most
general principle of mental functioning is at the same time
one
CARDINAL
of the terms of a polarity, pleasure principle-reality principle. Man
is man only if he postpones satisfaction, abandons possibilities of
enjoyment, and temporarily tolerates a
3
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
5
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
9
DATE
.
4
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
15
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
17
CARDINAL
.
certain degree of unpleasure on the long indirect road to pleasure.
This is the
first
ORDINAL
breach that
Freud
ORG
hastens to fill in. We still cannot speak, he says, of something beyond the pleasure principle,
first
ORDINAL
, because sexuality is proof that an entire part of the human psychism consistently resists being educated; and
secondly
ORDINAL
, because the admission of unpleasure into any human behavior may be
regarded as the roundabout path the pleasure principle takes in order to
gain ultimate dominance.
The same remarks are applicable to a
second
ORDINAL
kind of opposition to the pleasure principle.
The “Project”
ORG
had already stated that unpleasure is what educates man. The most
notable part of this education consists in the replacement of a
libidinal organization by another more highly complex
one
CARDINAL
. The successive organizations of sexuality, which were studied in
the Three Essays
ORG
and ever more finely differentiated and articulated in the
Freudian
NORP
school, are the most extensive illustration of this law of development.
One
CARDINAL
of the main things the neuroses have taught us is that earlier phases
of development are not simply replaced by succeeding ones, but that
conflicts arise between vestiges of the former and demands of the
latter. The parts of instinct that are cut off from the possibility of
satisfaction seek substitute modes of satisfaction now felt by the ego
as unpleasure. This unpleasure is a form of pleasure that cannot be felt
as such because it belongs to surpassed organizations of the libido;
the neurotic’s suffering belongs to this category of unpleasure. Thus
psychoanalysis teaches us to discern the pleasure principle in what is
felt by the ego as unpleasure.
Thus, each of these
two
CARDINAL
exceptions to the pleasure principle can pass as a modification of the
pleasure principle. Strictly speaking, the reality principle may be
regarded as the roundabout path adopted by the pleasure principle in
order to prevail in the end, and neurotic suffering as the mask that the
most archaic pleasure adopts in order to assert itself in spite of
everything. But it is clear that the circumstances that confirm the
pleasure principle are also the ones that weaken it, for it can be
conceived only in opposition to what interferes with it.
Continuing his skillful work of undermining (Ch.
2
CARDINAL
),
Freud
ORG
sets forth a new series of facts which, he assures us, presuppose the
existence and dominance of the pleasure principle and present as yet no
evidence of the existence of tendencies more primitive than it and
independent of it. Some of these facts are pathological, others normal.
Among the former,
Freud
ORG
considers the case of traumatic neurosis and in particular the war
neuroses; dreams in such cases have the characteristic of repeatedly
bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, showing
that he is fixated to his trauma. We are already in the area of the
compulsion to repeat, which is going to become the central reference of
the essay. But
Freud
ORG
adroitly steps back and makes a new suggestion drawn from children’s play.
We are presented with the case of a little boy,
age one and a half
DATE
. He is a good boy who lets his parents sleep, obeys orders not to touch
certain things, and above all never cries when his mother leaves him.
He plays at making a wooden reel disappear and reappear, at the same
time uttering an expressive “fort . . . da” (“gone . . . there”). What
does the game mean? It is obviously related to the child’s instinctual
renunciation that led us to say he is a good boy; it is a repetition of
the renunciation, but one in which he is no longer overpowered or
passive; the child is staging the disappearance and return of his mother
under the symbolic figure of objects within his reach. Thus unpleasure
itself is mastered by means of repetition in play, by the staging of the
loss of the loved person.
This episode, dear to some
French
NORP
psychoanalysts, is nevertheless inconclusive in
Freud
ORG
’s eyes. Once again he minimizes his own findings, with the help of that
strategy of lecturer and writer that keeps surprising the reader. Might
not the child’s efforts, he suggests, be put down to an instinct for
domination that is acting independently of whether the memory is
pleasurable or not? Or might it not be thought too that the child is
revenging himself on his mother by sending her away, as the young
Goethe
PERSON
did in throwing the dishes out of the window? Thus domination and
revenge do not necessarily incline us to seek something beyond the
pleasure principle in this impulse to repeat an unpleasant experience.®
5
CARDINAL
. “This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the
pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in
But why did
Freud
ORG
include this example? Was it not because he saw, mixed in with the
motives of domination and revenge, the manifestation of a more essential
tendency, driving one to the repetition of unpleasure in the form of
symbolism and play? This suggestion has its merits. The fort-da example
does not simply confirm the example of dreams in traumatic neurosis;
traumatic dreams suggest that the “beyond the pleasure principle,” the
more primitive tendency we are looking for, expresses itself only in the
compulsion to repeat; but symbolism and play also repeat unpleasure,
not compulsively, but by creating symbolism out of absence. The fort-da
of the child invites us to reserve for the death instinct a field of
expression distinct from the compulsion to repeat or even from
destructiveness. Would not this other, nonpathological aspect of the
death instinct consist in this mastery over the negative, over absence
and loss, implied in one’s recourse to symbols and play? It must be
admitted that it was not in this direction that
Freud
ORG
developed the theory of the death instinct, but rather in the direction
of destructiveness and the compulsion to repeat; perhaps it must be
said that in giving this silent instinct a conspicuous and clamorous
image, these
two
CARDINAL
representatives have also restricted its scope.
The decisive experience that led
Freud (Ch
ORG
.
3
CARDINAL
) to the death instinct was a certain difficulty that keeps recurring in
analytic treatment in connection with the struggle against the
resistances: viz. the tendency of the patient to repeat the repressed
material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as a
past memory. This compulsion is both the ally and the adversary of the
physician: his ally since it is inherent in the transference, his
adversary since it prevents the patient from recognizing the repetition
as a reflection of the forgotten past. Now if the ego’s resistance to
remembering is attributed to the pleasure principle (unpleasure would be
produced by the liberation of the repressed), and if the capacity for
tolerating the unpleasure of remembering is attributed to the reality
itself
unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the
mind. . . . [These cases and situations] are of no use for our purposes,
since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure
principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond
the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it
and independent of it” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
15
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
17
CARDINAL
).
principle, the compulsion to repeat indeed seems to lie outside either
one
CARDINAL
of these principles. What the patient repeats are precisely the
situations of distress and failure he underwent as a child, particularly
during the oedipal period. This tendency, further evidenced in the
strange fate of those persons who seem to call down upon themselves the
same misfortunes time and again, appears to justify the hypothesis of a
compulsion to repeat that is “more primitive, more elementary, more
instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides.”
Such is the factual basis—rather narrow, it may be said—upon which is built the forthcoming speculation (Ch.
4
CARDINAL
) concerning the death instinct. With consummate skill
Freud
ORG
prepares the reader for the new aspects of his speculation by relating
them to the earliest elements of the metapsychology, those which go back
to the period of
the “Project” and Studies on Hysteria
ORG
. It will be remembered that
Freud
ORG
had already borrowed from Breuer the hypothesis of
two
CARDINAL
regimes of psychical energy, free energy and bound energy. He now
incorporates this conception into his own speculation by relating it to
the above-mentioned theory of consciousness as a “surface” function in a
quasi-anatomical sense. This comparison, based on reasons of
ontogenesis, enables
one
CARDINAL
to contrast the divergent destinies of internal and external
perception. The reception of external stimuli is conditioned by the
erection of a protective shield: “protection against stimuli is an
almost more important function for the living organism than reception of
stimuli.” But “toward the inside,” i.e. toward the instincts, “there
can be no such shield.” To this lack of a shield against stimuli,
Freud
ORG
relates
Breuer
PERSON
’s notion of bound energy. At the same time he opens a breach in his
6
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
22
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
23
DATE
.
7
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
27
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
27
DATE
.
8
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
28
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
29
DATE
. (
Cf
ORG
. “Project,” Part I, beginning of
Section 10
LAW
.) The parallel between external and internal protection enables
Freud
ORG
to venture, in passing, a hypothesis concerning projection: when
internal excitations produce too great an increase of unpleasure, “there
is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the
inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the
shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against
them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a
large part in the causation of pathological processes” (
GW
ORG
,
13
DATE
,
29
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
29
DATE
).
own conception of the self-regulation of the psychical
apparatus by the pleasure principle alone. The pleasure principle begins
to operate only after a prior task has been assured, that of binding
the energy that streams into the psychical apparatus, i.e. of changing
it from a freely flowing state into a quiescent
one
CARDINAL
. This is the function,
Freud
ORG
states, that is prior to the pleasure principle. True, we have said
nothing as yet about the death instinct; but at least we have limited,
on an important point, the dominance of the pleasure principle—namely,
the point of defense.
This irreducible and prior function is
clearly revealed when it fails. For what is a trauma if not a breach in
an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli? Prior to pleasure,
therefore, there are procedures aimed at mastering the energies that
have broken the dikes: reaction to the influx of energy, or, in economic
language, anticathexis and hypercathexis.
These speculations on
the shield against stimuli and the breaches in that shield are not in
vain, for they enable us to explore the relations between defense and
anxiety.
Freud
ORG
describes anxiety (
Angst
NORP
) as “a particular state of expecting danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one,” whereas fright (
Schreck
PERSON
) refers to the state provoked by a danger
one
CARDINAL
encounters unprepared; fright is characterized by the factor of surprise. As for fear (
Furcht
ORG
), it arises from an actual encounter with a definite danger.
Preparedness for danger, the positive and characteristic function of
anxiety, is thus equivalent to a shield against stimuli; when such
preparedness is lacking, we have a breach in the shield, or trauma. In
light of these considerations about the relations between defense and
pleasure, we can now interpret the dreams that occur in traumatic
neurosis. Such dreams cannot be classified as fulfillments of wishes and
hence subject to the pleasure principle, for they have to do with the
task of defense, which precedes the dominance of pleasure: “These dreams
are endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing
the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” The
compulsion to repeat is thus confirmed as an exception to the pleasure
prin-
9
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
10
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
18
CARDINAL
,
12
DATE
.
ciple, insofar as the task of binding the traumatic
impressions is itself prior to the aim of gaining pleasure and avoiding
unpleasure.
It will be objected, however, that the priority that
the defensive measures, aimed at “binding” free energy, enjoy over the
pleasure principle (and over its modification, the reality principle)
has no relation to any possible death instinct. This is where the clever
tactician suddenly shows his cards: the factor that remains unexplained
in the compulsion to repeat is its “instinctual” (triebhaft) and even
“demonic” (demonisch) character. It is necessary to quote the entire
paragraph in which
Freud
ORG
achieves the decisive breakthrough, a result disproportionate to all the prudent preparations leading up to it:
But
how is the predicate of being “instinctual” related to the compulsion
to repeat? At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have
come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of
organic life in general which has not hitherto been clearly recognized
or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is
an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things
which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure
of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic
elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia
inherent in organic life. <175><176>
DATE
<
175
CARDINAL
> “If there is a ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ it is only
consistent to grant that there was also a time [Vorzeit] before the
purpose of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
33
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
33
DATE
).
<
176
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
38
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
36
DATE
.
And so, all that preparation was made simply in order to
isolate the instinctual character of the compulsion to repeat, which had
already been treated as
one
CARDINAL
of the means of defense and was thereby withdrawn from the dominance of
the pleasure principle. This instinctual character decisively
authorizes us to place inertia on an equal footing with the life
instinct.
The rest of the essay consists, on the one hand, in
pushing the hypothesis to an extreme, or rather in letting it extend of
itself, like a gas that is allowed full scope of extension, and, on the
other hand,
in rendering the hypothesis plausible by a method of convergent signs.
Let
us go then to the extreme! The extreme is this: Living things are not
put to death by external forces which surpass them, as in
Spinoza
GPE
; <
177
CARDINAL
> they die, they go to death by an internal movement: “everything
living dies for internal reasons . . . the aim of all life is death.”
<
178
CARDINAL
>
Better—
ORG
or worse?—life itself is not the will to change, to develop, but the
will to conserve itself: if death is the aim of life, all of life’s
organic developments are but detours toward death, and the so-called
conservative instincts are but the organism’s attempts to defend its own
fashion of dying, its particular path to death. Change is imposed by
external factors, the earth and the sun, i.e. the inanimate environment
of life; progress is disturbance and divergence, to which life adapts in
order to pursue its conservative aim at this new level. Dying becomes
increasingly difficult, for the paths to death have grown ever more
complicated and circuitous. As for the so-called “instinct toward
perfection,” it must be viewed as a consequence of obligatory
adaptation; if all the backward paths are blocked by repression, only
forward flight remains, the path of intellectual achievement and ethical
sublimation; but none of this requires an “instinct toward perfection”
distinct from the conservative tendencies of life.
<
177
CARDINAL
>
Spinoza
GPE
, Ethics, Part III,
Proposition
PERSON
4
CARDINAL
: “Nothing can be destroyed except by an external cause”; and the demonstration of
Proposition 6
LAW
: “Everything, so far as it can (quantum in se est), endeavors to persevere in its being.”
<
178
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
40
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
38
DATE
.
Would you like proof? Consider the migrations of certain fish
and birds returning to the former localities of the species, the
embryo’s recapitulation of earlier stages of life, the facts of
regeneration of organs: does not all this attest to the conservative
nature of life, to life’s inherent compulsion toward repetition?
The
reader will ask what the purpose of all this is. Its purpose is to
accustom us to see death as a figure of necessity, to help us submit “to
a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime ’Ai/ay/oj”; <
179
CARDINAL
> but above all to enable us to sing the paean of life, of libido, of
<
179
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
45
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
45
DATE
. We will come back to this mythical term
Ananke
PERSON
.
Freud
ORG
, beginning his own critique, observes: “It may be, however, that this
belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those
Eros!
Because life goes toward death, sexuality is the great exception in
life’s march toward death. Thanatos reveals the meaning of
Eros
LOC
as the factor that resists death. The sexual instincts are “the true
life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts,
which lead, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact
indicates that there is an opposition between them and the other
instincts, an opposition whose importance was
long ago
DATE
recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” <180><181><182><183><184>
illusions which we have created ‘um die
Schwere des Daseins
ORG
zu ertrageri ”
(ibid.; “to bear the burden of existence” is a citation from
Schiller, Die
ORG
Braut von Messina
PERSON
, I, 8).
<
183
CARDINAL
> “Is it really the case that, apart from the sexual instincts, there
are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state of
things? that there are none that aim at a state of things which has
never yet been attained?” {
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
43
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
41
CARDINAL
).
<
184
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
43
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
40
DATE
.
The result of this tortuous discussion is therefore a
straightforward dualism of instincts. Just what is this dualism? And how
does it relate to the earlier ways of expressing the dualism of the
instincts?
The replacement of the libido by
Eros
NORP
points to a very specific purpose of the new instinct theory. If the
living substance goes to death by an inner movement, what fights against
death is not something internal to life, but the conjugation of
two
CARDINAL
mortal substances.
Freud
ORG
calls this conjugation
Eros
LOC
; the desire of the other is directly implied in the emergence of
Eros
NORP
; it is always with another that the living substance fights against
death, against its own death, whereas when it acts separately it pursues
death through the circuitous paths of adaptation to the natural and
cultural environment.
Freud
ORG
does not look for the drive for life in some will to live inscribed in
each living substance: in the living substance by itself he finds only
death. <
185
CARDINAL
>
<
185
CARDINAL
>
Freud
ORG
compares his theory with that of
August
DATE
Weismann
PERSON
, who equates the mortal parts of living substance with the soma and the
immortal part with the germ-plasm. But he disagrees with
Weismann’s
ORG
contention that protozoa are immortal and that death is a late
acquisition of organisms. If the death instinct is primal, then not even
protozoa may be said to be immortal.
Freud
ORG
aligns himself more with authors who maintained that senescence is a
universal characteristic of life due to the impossibility of completely
voiding the products of metabolism, and who speculated about the
“rejuvenation” of protozoa through “conjugation.”
Freud
ORG
extrapolates this insight to both large and small unities. To large unities: in the
1921
DATE
essay
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego,
Freud
ORG
expressly assigns to
Eros
LOC
, to the libidinal bond, the cohesion of ever wider human groups and
more particularly of organized and artificial groups, such as the church
and the army. To small unities: the coalescence of unicellular
organisms suggests an application of the libido theory to the mutual
relationship of cells themselves. Thus a form of sexuality must be
attributed to cells, whereby each one would partly neutralize the death
instinct of the others: “In this way the libido of our sexual instincts
would coincide with the
Eros
LOC
of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together.”
This generalization of sexuality complicates rather than simplifies the situation. Instead of being a clear delimitation of
two
CARDINAL
domains, the dualism of
Eros
LOC
and
Thanatos
PRODUCT
appears as a dramatic overlapping of roles. In a sense, everything is
death, since selfpreservation is the circuitous path on which each
living substance pursues its own death. In another sense, everything is
life, since narcissism itself is a figure of
Eros
LOC
: we have only to recognize that
Eros
LOC
is the preserver of all things and that the self-preservation of the
individual derives from the mutual attachment of the cells of the soma.
Thus the new dualism expresses the overlapping of
two
CARDINAL
coextensive domains.
Comparison
GPE
with the earlier expressions of instinctual dualism confirms this puzzling situation.
Freud
ORG
was always a dualist; what kept changing was the distribution of the
opposed terms and the nature of the opposition itself. In the
distinction of sexual instincts and ego-instincts he was guided not by
an antagonism between instincts, but by the popular division of love and
hunger and the polarity between objects and ego. When narcissism was
introduced into the theory, the distinction became topographical and
economic and indicated a conflict between cathexes. The new dualism does
not replace the earlier one but actually reinforces it: indeed, if the
narcissistic libido of the ego is a figure of
Eros
LOC
, such libido is on the side of life. Yet we have said that the ego-instincts are opposed to
19
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
54
DATE
; SE,
18
DATE
,
50
DATE
.
20
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
56
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
52
DATE
.
the sexual instincts just as the death instincts are opposed
to the life instincts. This comparison is not rejected. We need only
consider that the new dualism is located not on the level of purposes,
aims, and objects, but on the level of forces; hence we must not try to
make the duality of ego-instincts and sexual instincts coincide with the
duality of life instincts and death instincts. The latter dualism cuts
across each of the forms of the libido; this will be verified in our
study of the representatives of the death instinct. Object-love is both
life instinct and death instinct; narcissistic love is
Eros
NORP
unaware of itself and clandestine cultivation of death. Sexuality is at
work wherever death is at work. At this point, however, the dualism of
instincts has truly become antagonistic, for it is no longer a question
of qualitative differences between hunger and love, as in the
first
ORDINAL
theory of the instincts, nor of differences in cathexis, according to
whether the libido turns toward the ego or toward objects, as in the
second
ORDINAL
theory of the instincts; the dualism has become what
Civilization
PERSON
and Its
Discontents
ORG
will call “a battle of the giants.”
THE DEATH INSTINCT AND THE
DESTRUCTIVENESS
OF
THE SUPEREGO
Above
EVENT
we insisted on the excess of meaning that “speculation” gives to the
death instinct as compared with the deciphering of that instinct in its
representatives, of whatever level or order they may be. We looked upon
this discordance
21
CARDINAL
. “The upshot of our inquiry so far has been the drawing of a sharp
distinction between the ‘ego-instincts’ and the sexual instincts, and
the view that the former exercise pressure towards death and the latter
towards a prolongation of life” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
46
DATE
; SE,
18
DATE
,
44
DATE
). And several pages later: “It was not our intention at all events to
produce such a result. Our argument had as its point of departure a
sharp distinction between ego-instincts, which we equated with death
instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts.
(We were prepared at
one
CARDINAL
stage to include the so-called self-preservative instincts of the ego
among the death instincts; but we subsequently corrected ourselves on
this point and withdrew it.) Our views have from the very
first
ORDINAL
been dualistic, and
today
DATE
they are even more definitely dualistic than before—now that we
describe the opposition as being, not between ego-instincts and sexual
instincts but between life instincts and death instincts” (
GW
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
57
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
53
DATE
).
as an irreducible given of the theory. We must now try to
understand it. Why the absence of symmetry between the hermeneutics of
life and the hermeneutics of death? Why does conjecture win out over
interpretation when we move from the libido theory, taken at its
two
CARDINAL
earlier stages of elaboration, to the theory of the life and death instincts?
An insistent remark of
Freud
ORG
himself may serve to get us started. On various occasions—already in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, but especially in
The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its Discontents—Freud
WORK_OF_ART
speaks of the death instinct as a “mute” energy, in contradistinction
to the “clamor” of life. This disparity between the death instinct and
its expressions, between desire and speech—a disparity signified by the
epithet “mute”—warns us that the semantics of desire no longer has the
same meaning. The desire for death does not speak, as does the desire
for life. Death works in silence. Hence the method of deciphering, based
on the equivalence of
two
CARDINAL
systems of reference, instincts and meaning, finds itself in
difficulty. Yet psychoanalysis has no other recourse than to interpret,
that is, to read an interplay of forces in an interplay of symptoms. In
his last works, therefore,
Freud
ORG
restricts himself to setting an adventuresome speculation alongside a
partial deciphering. Any given representative exhibits only “portions”
of the death instinct. But there will be no equivalence between what is
deciphered and what has been conjectured.
This point should be kept in mind when one enters into the series of papers that exploited the breakthrough achieved in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. One notices a
twofold
CARDINAL
shift of emphasis:
first
ORDINAL
, from the tendency to repeat to the tendency to destroy; next, from
more biological to more cultural expressions. But this series of
manifestations of the death instinct does not exhaust the weight of
meaning supplied by speculation; an essential significance may even be
lost when this silence is transcribed into clamor. Besides,
Freud
ORG
speaks more readily of the death instincts than of the death instinct (we have ignored this factor in our reconstruction of
Freud
ORG
’s speculation), thus reserving the possibility of a great variety of expres-
22. “The death instincts are by their nature mute . . . the clamor of life proceeds for the most part from
Eros”
NORP
(
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
275
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
46
DATE
).
sions and of a nonexhaustive enumeration of its manifestations.
The
first
ORDINAL
shift of emphasis is already very noticeable in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. The death instinct is introduced by the compulsion to repeat; but it
is confirmed and verified by aggressiveness, in its two forms of sadism
and masochism. These last
two
CARDINAL
examples do not have the same significance: sadism is simply
incorporated into the new theory, masochism is reinterpreted in light of
the new theory.
The theory of sadism was formulated very early. Ever since
the Three Essays on Sexuality
ORG
the term covers
three
CARDINAL
sets of phenomena.
First
ORDINAL
, it designates a more or less perceptible component in any normal and integrated sexuality;
second
ORDINAL
, it designates a perversion, sadism proper, i.e. a mode of being that
has become independent of that sexual component; and last, it also
stands for a pregenital organization, the sadistic stage, in which that
component plays a dominant role.
The case of masochism is quite different, for up to the present— in the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
and in “
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”—
WORK_OF_ART
masochism was nothing more than sadism “turned round” upon the ego, whereas
Freud
ORG
now regards the forms of masochism as derived phenomena, as a return or
regression to a primary masochism. We will soon see the importance this
has in the theory of the superego, conscience, and guilt.
All of this is only sketched in a few lines; in
1920
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
had not yet elaborated the concepts of fusion (
Vermischung
ORG
) and defusion (
Entmischung
PERSON
), by which he will account for the cooperation of the death instinct
with sexuality and for its separate functioning. At least these
two
CARDINAL
examples clearly bring out the disparity between the death instinct and
its manifestations, where the latter mark the emergence of the instinct
at the level of an object-relation. At
first
ORDINAL
view, the case of the death instinct does not seem to differ from that
of the life instinct: here too sadism and masochism are able to be
interpreted, for they have a particular “aim”—destruction—and definite
“objects”—the sexual partner or the ego. But nothing permits one to say
that the death instinct is fully manifested in these expressions
comparable to the representatives of the life instinct;
23
DATE
. The
Ego
PERSON
and the Id,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
4
CARDINAL
, “
The Two Classes of Instincts
ORG
.”
neither the play of the fort-da nor even the compulsion to repeat can be reduced to destructiveness. Destructiveness is
only one
CARDINAL
of the death instincts.
This double movement—the replacement of
the compulsion to repeat by destructiveness, and the switch from a
metabiology to a metaculture—will be completed only in
Civilization and Its Discontents
ORG
.
Sections IV
ORG
and V of The Ego and the Id supply the indispensable transition between the metabiology of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
and the metaculture of Civilization and Its Discontents.
The stroke of genius in
The Ego
WORK_OF_ART
and the Id was to couple the theory of the
three
CARDINAL
agencies—ego, id, superego—with the dualistic theory of the instincts of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. This confrontation makes it possible to pass from mere speculation to
actual deciphering. Henceforth, instead of considering the death
instincts face to face in a dogmatic mythology, we will approach them in
the density of the id, ego, and superego.
Strictly speaking, the
dualism of the instincts concerns only the id —it is an internal war of
the id. But starting from the instinctual interior, the war spreads out
until it finally bursts forth in the higher portions of the psychism,
in the “sublime.” This process of defusion assures the transition from
the biological speculation to the cultural interpretation and enables us
to set forth all the representatives of the death instinct, to the
point where the death instinct becomes inner punishment.
It is
necessary to elaborate the concepts of fusion and defusion; they are,
assuredly, economic concepts, as are the concepts of cathexis,
regression, and even perversion. To give them an energy basis,
Freud
ORG
adopts a hypothesis not unrelated to
Hughlings Jackson
PERSON
’s concept of “functional liberation”: the defusion of an instinct
liberates “a displaceable energy, which, neutral in itself, can be added
to a qualitatively differentiated erotic or destructive impulse, and
augment its total cathexis.” Have we come back purely and
24
CARDINAL
. “The death instinct would thus seem to express itself—though probably
only in part—as an instinct of destruction directed against the external
world and other organisms” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
41
CARDINAL
).
25
CARDINAL
. It is in these terms that the New Introductory Lectures combine the
second
ORDINAL
topography and the dualistic theory of the instincts.
26
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
272
CARDINAL
-73; SE,
19, 44
DATE
.
simply to speculation about the quantitative, about free and bound energy? There is no denying the conjectural aspect;
Freud
ORG
himself observes: “In the present discussion, I am only putting forward
a hypothesis; I have no proof to offer. It seems a plausible view that
this displaceable and neutral energy, which is no doubt active both in
the ego and in the id, proceeds from the narcissistic store of
libido—that it is desexualized
Eros
LOC
.” <
186
CARDINAL
> A sign of this is the looseness or indifference in the “displacements” brought about by the primary process.
<
186
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Thus the concepts of fusion and defusion have been constructed
in order to state in energy language what happens when an instinct
places its energy at the service of forces working in different systems.
Consequently they are not based upon anything verifiable at the energy
level itself where they are assumed to operate: fusion and defusion are
simply the correlates, in energy language, of phenomena discovered by
the work of interpretation when it focuses on the area of the
instinctual representatives.
To see the sequence of the various
representatives of the death instinct, it is necessary to examine them
from the bottom up, i.e. to proceed from the more biological to the more
cultural.
At the lowest level we meet with the erotogenic form
of masochism, pleasure in pain (Schmertzlust). It is dealt with very
briefly in The
Ego and the I
WORK_OF_ART
d and at greater length in
“The Economic Problem of Masochism
ORG
.” <
187
CARDINAL
> How does it come about that man takes pleasure in pain? It is not enough to say, as in
the Three Essays
ORG
, that an excess of pain or unpleasure gives rise to a libidinal sympathetic excitation (libidindse
Miterregung
ORG
) as a concomitant effect (
Nebenwirkung
PERSON
); granted that this mechanism exists, it provides only a physiological
foundation; what is essential takes place elsewhere, on the properly
instinctual level. It must be supposed that the destructive instinct is
split into
two
CARDINAL
tendencies.
One
CARDINAL
portion, under pressure from the life instinct, which seeks to render
it harmless, is diverted outward onto paths of the muscular apparatus;
this current of destructiveness places itself in the service of
sexuality
<
187
CARDINAL
> “
Das
PERSON
okonomische
Problem des Masochismus
PERSON
,”
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
371
CARDINAL
-83; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
-70.
and constitutes sadism proper. The other portion remains
inside the organism and “with the help of the accompanying sexual
excitation described above, becomes libidinally bound there”; this
constitutes erotogenic masochism, pleasure in pain. Erotogenic masochism
is therefore the “residuum,” remaining within, of a destructiveness
which may be viewed either as primal sadism or as primal masochism.
There is clearly much that remains puzzling: we do not know how the
“taming” (
Bandigung
PERSON
) of the death instinct by the libido is effected; we can only assume
that the libido is at work not only in sadism, that is, in the portion
of the death instinct diverted toward external objects, but in the
residuum remaining within, hence in masochism itself, which thus appears
as the most primitive “coalescence” (
Legierung
PERSON
) of love and death. Masochism accompanies the libido through all its
developmental phases and derives from them its successive “coatings”
(Umkleidungen): the fear of being eaten up (oral stage), the wish to be
beaten (sadistic-anal stage), castration fantasies (phallic stage),
fantasies of being copulated with (genital stage). Thus fusion and
defusion pinpoint a difficulty rather than provide the solution to a
problem.
In The Ego and the Id (Ch.
5
CARDINAL
), it is basically the theory of the superego that profits from this
rereading of the agencies from the viewpoint of death. We recall that
for psychoanalysis the superego derives from the father complex and is
thus a structure closer to the id than the perceptual ego is. But
one
CARDINAL
trait of the superego remained unexplained: its harshness and cruelty.
This strange character rejoins other disconcerting phenomena which at
first
ORDINAL
glance seem unrelated to it, such as the resistance to recovery. When
one comes to see that this resistance has a “moral” aspect to it, that
it is a form of self-punishment through suffering and that it therefore
involves an unconscious sense of guilt finding its satisfaction in the
illness, a consistent pattern is revealed which includes such different
phenomena as obsessional neurosis and melancholia, the resistance to
recovery, and the severity of the normal conscience. Let’s not go back
over the question of whether it is correct to speak of an “unconscious
sense of guilt.” What is important is the connection discovered between
guilt and death. We touch here upon the most extreme consequence of the
relationship between the superego and
the id. The instinctual character of the superego implies not only that the superego contains libidinal residues from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, but that it is charged with destructive rage thanks to the
defusion of the death instinct. This goes very far, even to the point of
diminishing the importance of instruction or reading, of the “things
heard”—in short, of word-presentations—in the development of conscience,
to the profit of the great obscure forces rising from below. How is it,
Freud
ORG
asks, that the superego manifests itself essentially as a sense of
guilt and develops such extraordinary cruelty toward the ego, to the
extent of becoming “as cruel as only the id can be”? The case of
melancholia leads us to think that the superego has taken possession of
all the available sadism, that the destructive component has entrenched
itself in the superego and turned against the ego: “What is now holding
sway in the superego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death
instinct.”
In thus emerging at the level of the superego, the
death instinct suddenly discloses the dimensions of this pure culture of
the death instinct. Caught between a murderous id and a tyrannical and
punishing conscience, the ego appears to have no recourse other than
self-torment or the torturing of others by diverting its aggressiveness
toward them. Hence the paradox: “the more a man checks his
aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe—that is
aggressive—he becomes in his ego ideal” —as if aggressiveness either has
to be turned outward against others or turned round upon the self.
One
CARDINAL
immediately perceives the religious extension of this ethical cruelty
in the projection of a higher being who punishes inexorably.
If we compare the cruelty of the superego with the previous description of “erotogenic masochism,” it seems at
first
ORDINAL
glance that any connection with sexuality is lacking; one may assume
that there exists a direct link between destructiveness and the superego
independently of any erotic factor. In “
The Economic Problem of Masochism
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Freud
PRODUCT
attempts to reconstruct the hidden connections
29
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
284
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
54
DATE
.
Freud
ORG
calls the sense of guilt in certain forms of obsessional neurosis
“over-noisy” (iiberlaut): it is indeed one of the “clamorous voices” of
the instinct which itself is “mute.”
30
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
53
DATE
.
31
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
18
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
54
DATE
.
between erotism and what he calls “moral masochism”—which, it is true, does not cover the whole domain of the superego.
The
unconscious sense of guilt, discovered in the tenacious resistance to
recovery and more correctly called the need for punishment
(Strafbediirfnis), throws light on this hidden link between moral
masochism and erotism. The link between the fear of conscience and
erotism stems from the deep-seated relationship the superego retains
with the id by reason of the libidinal ties with the parental source of
prohibition; this is the place to repeat it: the superego is the
“representative of the id” (
Vertreter
PERSON
des
Es
ORG
). This libidinal tie may be drawn out indefinitely, in proportion as
the father imago is replaced by increasingly distant and impersonal
figures, ending with the dark power of Destiny, which only the fewest of
men are able to separate from any parental connection.
But at
the same time this comparison affords us the occasion to introduce
certain nuances that appear to have been overlooked in
The Ego and the Id
WORK_OF_ART
, especially a difference between the superego’s sadism and the ego’s masochism (i.e. “moral masochism”). What was described in
The Ego and the I
WORK_OF_ART
d is the superego's sadism, which is “an unconscious extension of morality” (eine solche unbewusste
Fortsetzung der Moral
WORK_OF_ART
). The ego’s desire or need for punishment is not exactly the same
thing; such a desire is connected with the wish to be beaten by the
father, which we have seen to be
one
CARDINAL
of the expressions of “erotogenic masochism.” This desire expresses,
therefore, a resexualization of morality, in the reverse direction of
the normal movement of conscience and morality that arise from the
overcoming and hence from the desexualization of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. With the resexualization of morality the possibility of a
monstrous fusion of love and death arises; such a fusion on the
“sublime” plane has its counterpart on the “perverse” plane in the
phenomena of pleasure in pain.
One can see how dangerous it would
be to confuse everything: normal morality, cruelty (the superego’s
sadism), need for punishment (the ego’s masochism). These
three
CARDINAL
tendencies—the cultural suppression of the instincts, the turning back
of sadism against the self, and the intensification of the ego’s own
masochism—do indeed
supplement each other and unite to produce
the same effects; but, in principle at least, they are distinct
tendencies. The sense of guilt results from a combination of these
tendencies in various proportions.
If
one
CARDINAL
reexamines the analyses of The Ego and the Id in light of the distinctions proposed in
“The Economic Problem of Masochism
WORK_OF_ART
,” it must be said that the above description concerns the sadism of the
superego rather than the masochism of the ego or “moral masochism.” Is
this sadism of the superego as clearly opposed to the normal conscience
as the masochism characterized above by the re-sexualization of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex? It is more difficult to decide this. However, it is significant that in
Chapter 5 of The Ego
LAW
and the Id
Freud
ORG
limits himself to describing
two
CARDINAL
guilt maladies, obsessional neurosis and melancholia. He shows more
interest in their respective differences than in their shared similarity
to ordinary morality. In melancholia the superego reveals itself as a
pure culture of the death instinct, to the point of suicide. In
obsessional neurosis, on the contrary, the ego is protected from
self-destruction because of the transformation of its love-objects into
objects of hate; the ego struggles against this hate, which is turned
outward and which the ego has not adopted, while at the same time the
ego undergoes the assaults of the superego which holds the ego
responsible; whence the interminable torments of the ego which has to
defend itself on
two
CARDINAL
fronts. Are the torments of the obsessed and the melancholic’s
cultivation of death as clearly opposed to the desexualization of the
normal conscience as masochism was? It seems they are not. But the
picture is all the more disquieting, for even if the sadism of the
superego is independent of any erotic factor, we are presented with a
view in which the death instinct is directly included in the sadism of
the superego—the result being what might be called a deathly
sublimation. Such a view is suggested by the interrelating of defusion,
desexualization, and sublimation. Thus the sadism of the superego
represents a sublimated form of destructiveness; in proportion as
destructiveness becomes desexualized by defusion, it becomes capable of
being mobilized to the advantage of the superego; and at this point it
becomes a “pure culture of death.” The
desexualization of sadism is therefore no less dangerous than the resexualization of masochism.
Such
is the frightful discovery: the death instinct, too, can be sublimated.
To complete this grim picture it might be added that the instinctual
basis of this whole process is essentially the fear of castration. In
regard to the last text quoted I would like to call notice to a passing
remark
Freud
ORG
makes about the relationship between castration and the fear of
conscience (a far-reaching remark, if one remembers the role attributed
to the dread of castration in “
The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
WORK_OF_ART
”). The remark occurs at the end of The Ego and the Id: “The superior
being, which turned into the ego ideal, once threatened castration, and
this dread of castration is probably the nucleus round which the
subsequent fear of conscience has gathered; it is this dread that
persists as the fear of conscience.”
DATE
Thus the fear to which we related the genesis of illusions, the properly human fear, the fear of conscience (
Gewissenangst
NORP
), remains unintelligible apart from the death instinct.
CULTURE AS SITUATED BETWEEN
EROS AND THANATOS
We
have not yet considered the broadest impact of the new theory of
instincts on the interpretation of culture. The destructiveness of the
superego is
only one
CARDINAL
of the components of the individual conscience, on the borderline
between the normal and the pathological. The death instinct, however,
involves a reinterpretation of culture itself. The confrontation between
the definition of culture we gave above, based on the open-
32
CARDINAL
. “But since the ego’s work of sublimation results in a defusion of the
instincts and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the superego,
its struggle against the libido exposes it to the danger of maltreatment
and death. In suffering under the attacks of the superego or perhaps
even succumbing to them, the ego is meeting with a fate like that of the
protista [protozoa] which are destroyed by the products of
decomposition that they themselves have created. From the economic point
of view the morality that functions in the superego seems to be a
similar product of decomposition” (
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
287
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
56
CARDINAL
-57).
33
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
288
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19, 57
DATE
.
ing chapters of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
, and the reexamination of that definition as presented in
Chapters 3-5
PRODUCT
of Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
points to a deepening and also a unification of the notion of culture as faced by the death instinct.
Of course, in Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
,
Freud
ORG
is no less anxious than in
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
to give a purely economic definition of culture; but the economics of
the cultural phenomenon turns out to be profoundly renewed through its
relationship to a global strategy, the strategy of
Eros
NORP
versus death.
Let us consider the new economic interpretation of culture in Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
.
The interpretation is developed in
two
CARDINAL
phases:
first
ORDINAL
, what can be said without having recourse to the death instinct;
second
ORDINAL
, what can be said only after its intervention.
Prior to this
turning point, which makes the essay terminate on the tragedy of
culture, the essay advances with calculated ease. The economics of
culture is seen to coincide with what might be called a general
“erotics.” The aims pursued by the individual and those which animate
culture appear as figures, sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent, of
the same
Eros
LANGUAGE
: “The process of civilization is a modification which the vital process
experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by
Eros
LOC
and instigated by
Ananke—
CARDINAL
by the exigencies of reality; and . . . this task is one of uniting
separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties.”
Thus the same “erotism” forms the internal tie of groups and drives the
individual to seek pleasure and flee suffering—the threefold suffering
inflicted upon him by the external world, his own body, and other men.
Cultural development, like the growth of the individual from infancy to
adulthood, is the fruit of
Eros
NORP
and
Ananke
PERSON
, of love and work; we must even say, of love more than of work, for the
necessity of uniting in work in order to exploit nature is but a small
thing compared with the libidinal tie which unites individuals in a
single social body. It seems then, that the same
Eros
NORP
inspires the striving for individual happiness and wishes to unite men
in ever wider groups. But the paradox soon appears: as the organized
struggle against nature, culture gives man the power that
34
DATE
. Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
499
CARDINAL
-500;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
139
CARDINAL
.
was once conferred on the gods; but this resemblance to the gods leaves man unsatisfied: civilization and its discontents . . .
Why
this dissatisfaction? On the basis of this general “erotics” alone one
can, no doubt, account for certain tensions between the individual and
society, but not for the grave conflict that makes culture tragic. For
example, one can easily explain the fact that the family bond resists
extension to larger groups; to enter into the wider circle of life
necessarily appears to every young person as a breaking of the earliest
and closest ties; it is also understandable that something in feminine
sexuality resists the transfer of libidinal energy from private sex to
social aims.
One
CARDINAL
can adduce many other instances of conflict situations and still not
encounter any radical contradictions; it is well known that culture
imposes sacrifices in enjoyment upon all sexuality: the prohibition of
incest, the proscription of childhood sexuality, the arrogant channeling
of sexuality into the narrow paths of legitimacy and monogamy, the
insistence upon procreation, etc. But, however painful the sacrifices
and however complicated the conflicts, they still do not result in a
real antagonism. The most that can be said is,
first
ORDINAL
, that the libido resists with all its force of inertia the task culture lays on it to abandon its old positions, and
second
ORDINAL
, that the libidinal ties that constitute society draw their energy from
private sexuality, to the extent of endangering the latter with
atrophy. But all of this has so little of the tragic about it that we
can dream of a sort of armistice or accord between the individual and
the social bond.
And so the question arises again: Why does man fail to be happy? Why is man as a cultural being dissatisfied?
The analysis here reaches its turning point. Confronting man is an absurd commandment: to love
one
CARDINAL
’s neighbor as oneself; an impossible demand: to love
one
CARDINAL
’s enemies; a dangerous order: to turn the other cheek. These precepts
squander love, put a premium on being bad, and lead to ruin anyone
imprudent enough to obey them. But the truth behind the irrationality of
these imperatives is the irrationality of an instinct that lies outside
a simple erotics:
The element of truth behind all this, which
people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who
want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are
at-
tacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose
instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of
aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them . . . someone
who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his
capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his
consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain,
to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.
The instinct that
thus disturbs man’s relations with man and requires society to rise as
the implacable dispenser of justice is, of course, the death instinct,
here identified with the primordial hostility of man toward man.
With the death instinct there appears what
Freud
ORG
henceforward calls an “anticultural instinct.” From now on social ties
cannot be regarded as a mere extension of the individual libido, as in
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego. They are the expression of the conflict between instincts:
Man’s
PERSON
natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of
all against each, opposes this program of civilization. This aggressive
instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death
instinct which we have found alongside of
Eros
LOC
and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning
of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must
present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of
life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the
human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of,
and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as
the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the
giants that our nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about
Heaven. <
188><189
CARDINAL
>
<
188
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
470
CARDINAL
-71;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
111
CARDINAL
.
<
189
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
481
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
122
CARDINAL
. Eiapopeia vom
Himmel
GPE
is a quotation from
Heine
PERSON
’s poem
Deutschland
ORG
,
Caput
ORG
I,
Strophe 7
ORG
.
DATE
Thus culture itself has been transported onto the great cosmic stage of
life and death! In return, the “mute” instinct speaks in its
main
derivative and representative. Prior to a theory of culture death is
not yet manifested: culture is its sphere of manifestation; that is why a
purely biological theory of the death instinct had to remain
speculative; it is only in the interpretation of hate and war that
speculation about the death instinct becomes a process of deciphering.
There is thus a progressive revelation of the death instinct at
three
CARDINAL
levels, biological, psychological, cultural. Grasped at
first
ORDINAL
in the complexities of
Eros
LOC
, the death instinct remained masked in its sadistic component;
sometimes it reinforced object-libido, sometimes it hypercathected
narcissistic libido; its antagonism becomes less and less silent as
Eros
NORP
develops, uniting living matter to itself, then the ego to its object,
and finally individuals into ever wider groups. At this last level the
struggle between
Eros
LOC
and
Thanatos
ORG
becomes declared war; paraphrasing
Freud
ORG
, one might say that war is the clamor of death. The mythical aspect of
the speculation is not thereby lessened, however; death now appears not
only demonic but demoniacal:
Freud
ORG
now uses the voice of
Mephistopheles
NORP
to speak of death, just as he invoked
Plato’s Symposium
PRODUCT
to illustrate
Eros
PERSON
.
The rebound of the cultural interpretation of the death
instinct on the biological speculation has important effects. The final
consequence is an interpretation of the sense of guilt quite different
from the interpretation in terms of the individual psychology presented
in The Ego and the Id. Whereas in that essay the sense of guilt leaned
toward the pathological, by reason of the resemblance between the
cruelty of the superego and the sadistic or masochistic traits of
melancholia and obsessional neurosis,
Chapters 7
PRODUCT
and
8
CARDINAL
of Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
emphasize, to the contrary, the cultural function of the sense of
guilt. The sense of guilt is now seen as the instrument which culture
uses, no longer against the libido, but against aggressiveness. The
switch of fronts is important. Culture now represents the interests of
Eros
LOC
against myself, the center of deathly egoism; and it uses my own self-violence to bring to naught my violence against others.
This
new interpretation of guilt entails a complete shift of emphasis. Seen
from the point of view of the ego and in the framework
of its “dependent relations”
(The Ego and the Id, Ch. 5)
WORK_OF_ART
, the severity of the superego appeared excessive and dangerous; this
remains true and the task of psychoanalysis stays unchanged in this
regard: it always consists in attenuating that severity. But seen from
the point of view of culture and what might be called the general
interests of humanity, that severity is irreplaceable. Thus there is a
need to interrelate the
two
CARDINAL
readings of the sense of guilt. Its economics from the point of view of
the individual conscience and its economics from the point of view of
the task of culture are complementary. So little is the
first
ORDINAL
reading annulled by the
second
ORDINAL
that
Freud
ORG
restates it at the beginning of
Chapter 7 of Civilization
LAW
and Its
Discontents
NORP
. According to the
second
ORDINAL
reading, however, the main renunciation culture demands of the
individual is the renunciation not of desire as such but of
aggressiveness. Consequently, it is no longer sufficient to define the
fear of conscience as the tension between the ego and the superego; it
must be transported to the larger scene of love and death: “The sense of
guilt,” we will now say, “is an expression of the conflict due to
ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between
Eros
LOC
and the instinct of destruction or death.”
The
two
CARDINAL
readings are not merely superimposed, they mesh with one another: the
cultural function of guilt necessarily involves the psychological
function of the fear of conscience; from the point of view of the
psychology of the individual, the sense of guilt—at least in its
quasi-pathological form—appears to be merely the effect of an
internalized aggressiveness, of a cruelty taken over by the superego and
turned back against the ego. But its complete economics is seen only
when the need for punishment is placed in a cultural perspective:
“Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s
dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by
setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a
conquered city.”
We are thus at the heart of the “malaise” or
“discontent” peculiar to the life of culture. The sense of guilt now
internalizes the conflict of ambivalence that is rooted in the dualism
of the instincts. Hence, in order to decipher the sense of guilt, one
must penetrate to
38
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
483
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
123
CARDINAL
-24.
this most radical of all conflicts: “It is very conceivable
that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as
such . . . and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a
sort of malaise [
Unbehagen
ORG
], a dissatisfaction [Unzufriedenheit], for which people seek other motivations.” <
190
CARDINAL
> The extraordinary complexity of the sense of guilt is due to the
fact that the conflict between instincts is expressed by a conflict at
the level of the agencies; this is why the reading of
The Ego and the Id
WORK_OF_ART
is not abolished but incorporated into the
second
ORDINAL
reading.
<
190
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
495
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
135
CARDINAL
-36.
The same may be said about the interpretation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, on the scale of the individual or the species. The ambivalence
peculiar to the oedipal situation—feelings of love and hatred toward
the parental figure—is itself a part of the larger ambivalence between
the life and death instincts. Taken by themselves, the various genetic
considerations, which
Freud
ORG
worked out at different periods and which concern the killing of the
primal father and the institution of remorse, remain somewhat
problematic, if for no other reason than the contingency introduced into
history by the sense of guilt which at the same time presents itself as
a “fatal inevitability.” <191> The contingent character of this
developmental process as reconstructed by the genetic explanation is
softened as soon as this explanation is subordinated to the great
conflicts that dominate the course of culture; the family, which serves
as the cultural framework for the Oedipus episode, is itself simply a
figure of the great enterprise of
Eros
LOC
of forming ties and uniting; hence the Oedipus episode is not the only possible path leading to the institution of remorse.
<
191
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
492
CARDINAL
(die verhangnisvolle Unvermeidlichkeit des Schuld-gefiihls); SE,
21
CARDINAL
,
132
CARDINAL
.
Thus the reinterpretation of the sense of guilt at the end of Civilization and Its
Discontents
ORG
is seen to be the climax in the series of figures of the death
instinct. By mortifying the individual, culture places death at the
service of love and reverses the initial relationship between life and
death. We recall the pessimistic formulas of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
: “The aim of all life is death”; the function of the instincts of self-preservation “is to assure that the
organism
shall follow its own path to death . . . Thus these guardians of life,
too, were originally the myrmidons of death.” But the same text, having
reached this critical point, turns back upon itself: the life instincts
struggle against death. And now culture comes upon the scene as the
great enterprise of making life prevail against death: its supreme
weapon is to employ internalized violence against externalized violence;
its supreme ruse is to make death work against death.
That the theory of culture thus finds its completion in the reinterpretation of the sense of guilt is expressly desired by
Freud
ORG
. Apologizing for the troublesome and unexpected detours of the
discussion of the sense of guilt, he states: “This may have spoilt the
structure of my paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to
represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the
development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our
advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening
of the sense of guilt.”
Freud
ORG
illustrates this ruse on the part of culture by citing in support of his interpretation the famous line of
Hamlet
ORG
’s monologue, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” But such
“cowardice” is also the death of death; it is the work of the spy whom
culture, in the service of
Eros
LOC
, has “garrisoned” at the heart of the individual, as in a conquered
city; for, in the last analysis, the “discontent of civilization” is
“the sense of guilt produced by civilization.”
42
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
495
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
135
CARDINAL
.
Chapter 3
LAW
: Interrogations
I would like to pay tribute to
Freud
ORG
by gathering together in this chapter some of the questions he opens up
for us but does not completely solve. In spite of the trenchant and
even intransigent tone of the master who rarely tolerated disagreement
or dissent, the final phase of
Freud
ORG
’s doctrine terminates on a number of unresolved questions which we will try to assess in a provisional way:
1
CARDINAL
. Is it certain that we know the death instinct better as it becomes
more manifest and is finally revealed at the level of culture as the
instinct of destruction? Don’t the biological considerations contain a
surplusage of speculation not accounted for in cultural deciphering and
which presents matter for further thought? Finally, what is negativity
in
Freud
ORG
’s doctrine?
2
CARDINAL
. Must we not also doubt our most confident assertions about pleasure?
Throughout, we have regarded pleasure as the “watchman over life”; as
such, can it express merely the reduction of tensions? If pleasure is
connected with life, and not solely with death, must it not be something
more than the psychical sign of the reduction of tensions? Indeed, do
we ultimately know what pleasure means?
3
CARDINAL
. Finally, what about the reality principle, which seems indeed to usher
in a wisdom beyond illusion and consolation? How does this lucidity,
with its attendant pessimistic austerity, ultimately fit in with the
love of life which the drama of love and death seems to call for? Does
Freudian
NORP
doctrine finally find a philosophical unity of tone, or does it remain
definitively split between the scientism of its initial hypotheses and
the
Naturphilosophie
GPE
toward which
Eros
NORP
leads it and which, perhaps, had never ceased being the animating force
of this tenacious exploration of the universe of desire?
Such is the meaning of the
three
CARDINAL
questions on which, in my opin-
ion, the final reading of
Freud
ORG
terminates: What is the death instinct and how is it connected with
negativity? What is pleasure and how is it connected with satisfaction?
What is reality and how is it connected with necessity?
WHAT IS NEGATIVITY?
The death instinct is a problematic
concept in many respects.
First
ORDINAL
of all there is the problem of the relationship between speculation and
interpretation. No reader can be insensible to the uncertain, winding,
and even “limping” character of this speculation and its set of
heuristic hypotheses.
Freud
ORG
himself admits he does not know to what extent he believes in them. <
192><193
ORDINAL
> At times he talks about an equation with
two
CARDINAL
unknown quantities. <
194
CARDINAL
> Again, he says that the supposition of a tendency to restore an
earlier state of things, if comparable to a ray of light in the
darkness, is nevertheless “a myth rather than a scientific explanation.”
<
195
CARDINAL
> No treatise of
Freud
ORG
’s is so adventurous as
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. The reason is clear: all direct speculation about the instincts, apart from their representatives, is mythical. Thus the
third
ORDINAL
theory of the instincts is more mythical than the earlier ones, for it
claims to reach the very substrate of the instincts. The
first
ORDINAL
concept of libido, sharply distinguished from the ego-instincts, was
the unifying concept presupposed by the various vicissitudes or
destinies of the instincts; the
second
ORDINAL
concept of libido, covering both object-libido and ego-libido, was wider than the
first
ORDINAL
, for it controlled the various distributions of the libidinal cathexes.
The speculation on life and death is an attempt to go beneath these
two
CARDINAL
concepts of libido. The network of “analogies, correlations and connections” <
196
CARDINAL
> involved in
<
192
CARDINAL
> In the last lines of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
,
Freud
ORG
quotes
two
CARDINAL
oriental verses taken from
one
CARDINAL
of the Maquamat of al-Hariri: “What we cannot reach flying we must
reach limping. . . . The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.”
<
193
CARDINAL
> Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
64
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
59
DATE
.
<
194
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
62
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
57
DATE
.
<
195
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
196
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
66
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
60
CARDINAL
.
the hypothesis is far looser than before; the speculation is disproportionate to the phenomenon meant to verify it;
Freud
ORG
admits that the hypothesis of the death instinct may have led him to
overestimate the significance of the facts concerning the compulsion to
repeat. <
197
CARDINAL
> We have seen that all the other facts that contribute to this central phenomenon might also be interpreted in another way.
<
197
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
66
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
59
DATE
.
DATE
Thus the remainder of our study operated on the plane of analogical
interpretation and consisted in a gradual and piecemeal reconquest of
what had
first
ORDINAL
been posited on the speculative plane. But we must be aware of the
initial excess of speculation over interpretation; from the standpoint
of epistemology, this is the most striking feature of the essay. This
excess of speculative meaning is essentially due to the fact that the
hypotheses at work are directly metabiological in nature: “Biology is
truly a land of unlimited possibilities.” <
198
CARDINAL
> But the metabiology is itself more mythological than scientific, in spite of the discussions on
Weismann
ORG
and the death of protozoa. The mythical name of
Eros
LOC
is ready proof that we are closer to the poets than to the scientists,
closer to the speculative philosophers than to the critical ones. It is
no accident that the only philosophical text quoted is taken from the
mythical part of
Plato’s Symposium
ORG
(
Aristophanes’
ORDINAL
discourse about the primeval androgynous men); it is a “poet-philosopher” who teaches that
Eros
LOC
wishes to reunite what a malicious divinity had divided and set
asunder. Further, do we not feel that we are listening to one of the
pre-Socratics when Eros is called that “which holds all living things
together,” “the preserver of all things”? <
199
CARDINAL
>
<
198
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
66
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
60
DATE
.
<
199
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
54
DATE
,
56
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
50
DATE
,
52
DATE
.
Why did
Freud
ORG
thus venture, hesitancy matching intransigency, into the area of
metabiology, speculation, and myth? It is not enough to say that
Freud
ORG
’s theorizing was always in excess of interpretation in every field of
investigation. What poses a problem is the quasi-mythological nature of
this metabiology. Perhaps it must be supposed that
Freud
ORG
was fulfilling one of his earliest wishes—to go from psychology to
philosophy—and that in this way he was setting free the romantic demands
of his thought which the mechanistic scientism of his
first
ORDINAL
hypotheses had only masked over.
Thus what is most suspect in
this essay is also the most revealing: under a scientific surface, or
rather under the coating of a scientific mythology, there arises the
Naturphilosophie
PERSON
which the young
Freud
ORG
admired in
Goethe
GPE
.
But then, must it not be said that the whole libido theory was already under the control of
Naturphilosophie
PERSON
and that
Freud
ORG
’s entire doctrine is a protest on the part of the nature-philosophy
against the philosophy of consciousness? The patient reading of desire
in its symptoms, its fantasies, and in general its signs never equaled
the hypothesis of the libido, of instincts, of desire.
Freud
ORG
is in line with those thinkers <
200
CARDINAL
> for whom man is desire before being speech; man is speech because the
first
ORDINAL
semantics of desire is distortion and he has never completely overcome this initial distortion. If this is so, then
Freud
ORG
’s doctrine would be animated from beginning to end by a conflict
between the “mythology of desire” and the “science of the psychical
apparatus”—a “science” in which he always, but in vain, tried to contain
the “mythology,” and which, ever since
the “Project,”
ORG
was exceeded by its own contents. <
201
CARDINAL
> This muffled conflict will make its appearance again at the end of
this chapter, no longer at the level of the initial hypotheses, but at
the level of final wisdom.
<
200
CARDINAL
> In the “
Dialectic
NORP
” we shall attempt to compare the
Freudian
NORP
libido with the
Spinozist
NORP
conatus and the
Leibnizian
NORP
appetition, and also with will in
Schopenhauer
GPE
and the will to power in
Nietzsche
ORG
.
<
201
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part I,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
.
But the excess of meaning of the death instinct, taken in its
most speculative expressions, as compared with the whole series of its
biological, psychical, and cultural expressions, reveals another
problematic aspect of this strange concept. Is it certain that all the
meaning it carries is fully brought out in the cultural interpretation?
The speculation’s excess of meaning as compared with the interpretation
does not seem to indicate a defect in the theory; on the contrary, it
suggests that the death instinct, which is finally regarded as
anticultural destructiveness, may conceal another possible meaning, as
we will suggest further on in the investigation of “
Negation
WORK_OF_ART
.”
If one reads the series of representatives of the death instinct in the reverse order, one is struck by the disparity between
three
CARDINAL
themes: the inertia of life, the compulsion to repeat, and destruc-
tiveness.
One
CARDINAL
begins to suspect that the death instinct is a collective term, an
incongruous mixture: biological inertia is not pathological obsession,
repetition is not destruction. Our suspicion grows stronger when we
consider other manifestations of the negative that are irreducible to
destructiveness.
Let us return to the intriguing example of the
child’s fort-da play. This game of making the mother symbolically
disappear and reappear consists, no doubt, in the repetition of an
affective renunciation; but unlike the dreams that occur in traumatic
neurosis, the play repetition is not a forced or obsessive one. To play
with absence is already to dominate it and to engage in active behavior
toward the lost object as lost. Hence, as we asked when we presented
Freud
ORG
’s analysis of children’s play, do we not discover another aspect of the
death instinct, a nonpathological aspect, which would consist in
one
CARDINAL
’s mastery over the negative, over absence and loss? And is not this negativity implied in every appeal to symbols and to play?
This question ties in with the question we asked earlier concerning
Leonardo
GPE
’s creations. With
Freud
ORG
, we said that the lost archaic object has been “denied” and “triumphed
over” by the work of art which recreates the object or rather creates it
for the
first
ORDINAL
time by offering it to all men as an object of contemplation. The work
of art is also a fort-da, a disappearing of the archaic object as
fantasy and its reappearing as a cultural object. Thus, does not the
death instinct have as its normal, nonpathological expression, the
disappearing-reappearing in which the elevation of fantasy to symbol
consists?
This interpretation is not without support in
Freud
ORG
. As a final note to the death instinct we have reserved examination of
one
CARDINAL
of the most remarkable of
Freud
ORG
’s short essays, entitled “
Die Ver
PRODUCT
-neinung.” The word
Verneinung
PERSON
ordinarily designates the contrary of
Bejahung—
ORG
affirmation; thus the title of the paper is correctly translated as “
Negation
WORK_OF_ART
,” for the term purely and simply designates the sense of “no” as opposed to “yes.” By a series of meanders
Freud
ORG
ends up expressly linking negation, the “no,” with the death instinct.
11
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, p.
173
CARDINAL
, n.
22
CARDINAL
.
12
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
11-15
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
235
CARDINAL
-39.
But just what type of negation is this? Very definitely it
is not located in the unconscious; the unconscious, let us remember,
contains neither negation, nor time, nor the function of reality.
Therefore negation belongs to the system
Cs
ORG
., along with temporal organization, control of action, motor inhibition
involved in every thought process, and the reality principle itself.
Thus we meet with an unexpected result: there exists a negativity that
does not belong to the instincts but defines consciousness, conjointly
with time, motor control, and the reality principle.
The
first
ORDINAL
manifestation of this negativity of consciousness is seen in the process of becoming aware of what is repressed. As
Freud
ORG
notes in the opening lines of his paper, when a patient accompanies an
association of ideas or a dream fragment with a protestation such as
“It’s not my mother,” the negation does not actually belong to the
association that has just come into consciousness; it is rather a
condition on which the repressed idea may make its way into
consciousness: “Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is
repressed; indeed it is already a lifting [
Aujhebung
PERSON
] of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance [Annahme] of what is repressed.”
Freud
ORG
can even say that “There is no stronger evidence that we have been
successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the
patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn’t think that,’ or ‘I didn’t
(ever) think of that.’ ” The “no” is the certificate of origin—the “Made
in
Germany”—which
GPE
attests that the thought belongs to the unconscious. “With the help of
the symbol of negation [Verneinungssymbol], thinking frees itself from
the restrictions of repression and enriches itself with material that is
indispensable for its proper functioning.” Thus “a negative judgment is
the intellectual substitute for repression.”
The
second
ORDINAL
function of negation has to do with reality-testing. This new function
is actually a continuation of the previous one: we know that the
conditions of becoming conscious and those of reality-testing are the
same, for they are the conditions that govern the differentiation
between the internal and the external. The negative judgment “A does not
possess the attribute B” is truly a judgment of real existence only
when it goes beyond the viewpoint of
13
DATE
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
12
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
235
CARDINAL
-36.
14
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
12
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
236
CARDINAL
.
the pleasure-ego, for whom to say “yes” means that it wants to
introject into itself what is good, i.e. to “devour” it, and to say
“no” means that it wants to eject from itself what is bad, i.e. to “spit
it out.” The judgment of reality is a sign that the “initial
pleasure-ego” (anfangliches Lust-1ch) has been replaced by the
“definitive reality-ego” (endgiiltiges Real-Ich). The question at this
point is not whether what has been perceived (wahrgenommen) can be taken
(aufgenommen) into the ego, but whether something that is in the ego as
a presentation can be rediscovered in reality. Thus is established the
differentiation between a presentation, which is only “internal,” and
the real, which is also “outside.” What place does the “no” have in this
testing of reality? The function of negation— implicit in every
judgment, even positive ones—lies in the interval between “to find” and
“to refind” (wiederfinden). A presentation is not an immediate
presenting of things, but a re-presentation of things that are absent:
“A precondition for the setting up of realitytesting is that objects
shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.” It is
against this background of absence, of loss, that presentation offers
itself to reality-testing: “The
first
ORDINAL
and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the
one
CARDINAL
presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is
still there.” Thus the interval of negation, separating the original
presence from the presentation, makes possible the critical testing from
which both a real world and a real ego emerge. If
one
CARDINAL
compares the
three
CARDINAL
analyses— the fort-da in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, esthetic creation in the
Leonardo
GPE
, and perceptual judgment in “Negation”—the traits of the function of
negativity start to become clear. The disappearingreappearing of play,
the denying-overcoming of esthetic creation, and the losing-refinding of
perceptual judgment all share a common operation.
What connection does this negativity have with the death instinct? Here is what
Freud
ORG
writes at the end of “
Negation”
LAW
:
The study of judgment affords us, perhaps for the
first
ORDINAL
time, an
insight into the origin of an intellectual function from the inter-
15
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
14
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
238
CARDINAL
. The same formulation occurs in the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (
GW
ORG
,
5
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
222
CARDINAL
).
play of the primary instinctual impulses. Judging is a
continuation, along lines of expediency [zweckmassige], of the original
process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from
itself, according to the pleasure principle. The polarity of judgment
appears to correspond to the opposition of the
two
CARDINAL
groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affirmation —as a substitute for uniting—belongs to
Eros
LOC
; negation—the successor to expulsion—belongs to the instinct of
destruction. The general wish to negate, the negativism which is
displayed by some psychotics, is probably to be regarded as a sign of a
defusion [
Entmischung
ORG
] of instincts that has taken place through a withdrawal of the
libidinal components. But the performance of the function of judgment is
not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has
endowed thinking with a
first
ORDINAL
measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle. <
202
CARDINAL
>
<
202
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
15
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
238
CARDINAL
-39.
Freud
ORG
does not say that negation is another representative of the death
instinct; he only says that negation is genetically derived from it by
“substitution,” as in general the reality principle is substituted for
the pleasure principle (or as a character trait, avarice, for example,
is substituted for an archaic libidinal constitution, such as anality).
We have no right, then, to draw out of this text more than is warranted
and to give it a direct
Hegelian
NORP
translation. We may do this on our own, at our own risk, but not as interpreters of
Freud
ORG
.
Freud
ORG
develops an “economics” of negation and not a “dialectic” of truth and certainty, as in the
first
ORDINAL
chapter of
The Phenomenology of Spirit
WORK_OF_ART
. Nonetheless, even within thesp strict limits this short article makes
an important contribution: consciousness implies negation —both in the
process of “achieving insight” into its own hidden richness and in the
“recognition” of what is real.
It is not surprising that negation
is derived from the death instinct by way of substitution. On the
contrary, what is surprising is that the death instinct is represented
by such an important function which has nothing to do with
destructiveness, but rather with the symbolization of play, with
esthetic creation, and with realitytesting itself. This discovery is
enough to throw into flux the whole
analysis of the
representatives of instincts. The death instinct is not closed in upon
destructiveness, which is, we said, its clamor; perhaps it opens out
onto other aspects of the “work of the negative,” which remain “silent”
like itself.
PLEASURE AND SATISFACTION
What has become of the pleasure principle at the end of the essay that claims to go beyond it?
To
raise this question is to ask: Exactly what is “beyond the pleasure
principle”? But there is no definite answer to this question —a
surprising situation, when one thinks of the title of the treatise
itself. In point of fact, it turns out that the “beyond” cannot be
found. Not only is there no final answer, but along the way we have lost
even a provisional answer. This is not the least “problematic” aspect
of the essay.
Let us recall the initial question and its provisional answer prior to the introduction of the death instinct.
The
question did have a definite meaning, insofar as one admitted the
equivalence between the constancy principle and the pleasure principle.
This being granted—and
Freud
ORG
will not seriously question it in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, but only in
“The Economic Problem of Masochism”—to
WORK_OF_ART
search for something beyond the pleasure principle is to question
whether there exist “tendencies more primitive than it and independent
of it,” that is, tendencies irreducible to the effort of the psychical
apparatus to reduce its tensions and keep them at the lowest level.
We
had found such a tendency, however, even before the introduction of the
death instincts. On the one hand, it was manifested by the compulsion
to repeat, which operates in spite of the unpleasure which the
repetition revives; on the other hand, it was possible to connect it
with a task that is prior to the seeking of pleasure, the task of
“binding” free energy. Undoubtedly this tendency and this task are not
opposed to the pleasure principle; but at least they do not derive from
it.
But now the great roles of death and life come upon the scene.
17
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, p.
283
CARDINAL
, n.
4
CARDINAL
.
Instead of reinforcing the
first
ORDINAL
result, the introduction of the death instinct destroys it. The death
instinct turns out to be the most striking illustration of the constancy
principle, of which the pleasure principle is always regarded as a mere
psychological double. It is impossible not to relate the tendency “to
restore an earlier state of things,” which defines the death instinct,
with the tendency of the psychical apparatus to maintain the quantity of
excitation present in it at the lowest possible level or at least to
keep it constant. Must
one
CARDINAL
go so far as to say that the principle of constancy and the death
instinct coincide? But then the death instinct, introduced precisely in
order to account for the instinctual character of the compulsion to
repeat, is not beyond the pleasure principle, but is somehow identical
with it.
This further step must be taken, I believe, at least so long as
one
CARDINAL
assumes the equivalence of the pleasure principle and the constancy
principle. If pleasure expresses a reduction of tension, and if the
death instinct marks a return of living matter to the inorganic, it must
be said that pleasure and death are both on the same side. More than
once
Freud
ORG
touches on this paradox:
The dominating tendency of mental life,
and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to
keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the “Nirvana
principle,” to borrow a term from
Barbara Low)—a
FAC
tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of the fact is
one
CARDINAL
of our strongest reasons for believing in 'the existence of death instincts. <
203
CARDINAL
>
<
203
CARDINAL
> Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
60
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
55
CARDINAL
-56.
And further on: “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.” <
204
CARDINAL
> The same paradox is touched on in The Ego and the Id, where the
condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction is compared to
dying. <
205
CARDINAL
>
<
204
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
69
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
63
DATE
.
<
205
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
276
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
47
DATE
.
But then, it will be asked, what is beyond the pleasure
principle? All the terms we have thus far opposed to one another have
gone over to the same side, the side of death: constancy, the return to
an
earlier state of things, pleasure . . . And if one considers
that the task of “binding” free energy is a preparatory act “which
introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle,” <
206
CARDINAL
> that task is itself in the service of the pleasure principle and
consequently of the death instinct. All the differences are annulled in
the general tendency toward annulment.
<
206
CARDINAL
> Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
67
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
62
DATE
.
There remains but
one
CARDINAL
possible answer: if the pleasure principle means nothing more than the principle of constancy, must it not be said that only
Eros
LOC
is beyond the pleasure principle?
Eros
LOC
is the great exception to the principle of constancy. I am well aware that
Freud
ORG
writes that all the instincts are conservative; <
207
QUANTITY
> but he adds that the life instincts are conservative to a higher
degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences,
and, in another sense, that they preserve life itself for a
comparatively long period. <
208
CARDINAL
> Further, the hypothesis of a “sexuality of cells” allows one to
interpret self-preservation and even narcissism as an “erotic” sacrifice
of each cell for the good of the whole body, hence as a manifestation
of
Eros
LOC
. Finally and above all, if
Eros
PERSON
is “the preserver of all things,” it is because it “unites all things.”
But this enterprise runs counter to the death instinct:
“Union
ORG
with the living substance of a different individual increases those
tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh ‘vital
differences’
GPE
which must then be lived off.” <
209
CARDINAL
> Thus we have the sketch of an answer: that which escapes the principle of constancy is
Eros
LOC
itself, the disturber of sleep, the “breaker of the peace.” However,
doesn’t this proposition destroy the hypothesis that lies at the origin
of psychoanalysis, namely that the psychical apparatus is regulated
quasi-automatically by the principle of constancy?
<
207
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
42
CARDINAL
-43; SE,
18, 40
DATE
.
<
208
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
209
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
60
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
DATE
,
55
DATE
.
Actually, the questioning of the initial theory’s key concepts
extends even further: what becomes most problematic is the meaning of
pleasure itself. In Beyond
the Pleasure Principle Freud
ORG
does not explicitly question the earliest equivalence of the entire
metapsychology, that of the pleasure principle and the constancy
principle;
but the conclusions he draws from it after the
introduction of the death instincts simply make the equivalence
untenable. What is on the side of death is the
Nirvana
ORG
principle, the only faithful translation of the constancy principle
into human affectivity. But is the pleasure principle completely
contained in the
Nirvana
GPE
principle? The supposition that pleasure and love may not be on the
same side in the battle of the giants waged by life and death is
difficult to maintain to the very end. How could pleasure remain foreign
to the creation of tensions, that is to say, to Eros? Is not this
creation what is felt even in the discharge of tension? Must we not say,
then, with
Aristotle
GPE
, that pleasure completes an activity, a function, an operation, as a
supervenient end? But then what becomes suspect is the definition of
pleasure in purely quantitative terms as a simple function of the
increase or diminution of a quantity described as tension due to
stimulus.
Freud
ORG
began to draw this conclusion in
1924
DATE
, in
“The Economic Problem of Masochism”
WORK_OF_ART
: the pleasure principle, he concedes, is not the same thing as the
Nirvana
ORG
principle; it is only the latter that is “entirely in the service of
the death instincts.” It must be recognized that “in the series of
feelings of tension we have a direct sense of the increase and decrease
of amounts of stimulus [Zunahme und
Abnahme
NORP
der
Reizgrossen
PERSON
direkt in der
Reihe
PERSON
derf
Spannungsgefiihle
PERSON
empfinderi], and it cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable
tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tensions.” Pleasure, then,
would be linked to a qualitative characteristic of the excitation
itself, perhaps to its rhythm, its temporal rise and fall.
However,
Freud
ORG
limits the extent of this concession by tying the pleasure principle back in with the
Nirvana
ORG
principle; the pleasure principle is a modification imposed by the life
instinct. In this way the pleasure principle incontestably remains the
“watchman” over life. Its role as watchman or guardian expresses its
ties with the principle of constancy, but it is the watchman over life
and not over death.
Is this not an admission that the great
dualism of love and death also cuts across pleasure? And does it not
imply that the reason we
25
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
372
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
19
DATE
,
160
CARDINAL
.
26
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
do not know what is beyond the pleasure principle is that we do not know what pleasure is?
There are numerous reasons in
Freud
ORG
’s own writings for having doubts about our knowledge of the nature of pleasure. In the
first
ORDINAL
place it should not be forgotten that the earliest formulation of the
pleasure principle is closely connected with a representation of the
psychical apparatus which, as we have repeatedly emphasized, is
solipsistic in nature. The topographic-economic hypothesis is
solip-sistic by construction, but this characteristic never attaches to
the clinical facts that the hypothesis translates—the relation to the
mother’s breast, the father, the family constellation, authorities— nor
to the analytic experience, dramatized in the transference, in which
interpretation takes place. The very notion of impulse or instinct, more
basic than all the auxiliary representations of the topography, is
distinct from the ordinary notion of instinct inasmuch as an instinct in
the
Freudian
NORP
sense involves other persons. Hence, the final meaning of pleasure
cannot be the discharge of tensions within an isolated apparatus; such a
definition applies only to the solitary pleasure of autoerotic
sexuality. Ever since
the “Project” Freud
EVENT
used the word “satisfaction
” (Befriedigung) for that quality of pleasure that requires the
WORK_OF_ART
help of others.
But then, if we introduce other persons into the circuit of pleasure, other difficulties appear. The structure of
Wunsch
GPE
has taught us that a wish or a desire is not a tension that can be discharged; desire, as
Freud
ORG
himself describes it, reveals a constitution that is insatiable. The
Oedipus drama implies that the child desires the unobtainable (to
possess his mother, or to have a child by his mother); the “evil
infinitude” that dwells in him cuts him off from satisfaction.
Moreover,
if man could be satisfied, he would be deprived of something more
important than pleasure—symbolization, which is the counterpart of
dissatisfaction. Desire, qua insatiable demand, gives rise to speech.
The semantics of desire, which we are focusing upon here, is bound up
with this postponement of satisfaction, with this endless mediating of
pleasure.
Strangely enough,
Freud
ORG
has a more finely developed conception
of the evils that are
“the burden of existence” than he has of pleasure. While he continues to
speak of pleasure as a discharge of tension, he very sharply
distinguishes between unpleasure—the simple contrary of pleasure—and
numerous forms of suffering: the trilogy of fear, fright, and anxiety;
the threefold fear due to dangers from the external world, from
instincts, and from conscience. Even the fear of death is differentiated
into biological fear and fear of conscience, the latter being related
to the threat of castration.
Freud
ORG
also stresses the malaise or discontent (
Unbehagen
ORG
) inherent in man’s cultural existence; man cannot be satisfied as a
member of culture, for he pursues the death of others, and culture turns
against him the torments he inflicted on others. There is something
contradictory and impossible about the task of culture: to coordinate
the ego’s egoistic urge, which is biologically turned toward death, and
its altruistic urge toward union with others in the community.
Ultimately, what makes for endless dissatisfaction is the unresolvable
struggle between love and death.
Eros
NORP
wishes union, but must disturb the peace of inertia; the death instinct
wishes the return to the inorganic, but must destroy the living
organism. This paradox continues on into the higher stages of civilized
life: a strange struggle indeed, for civilization kills us in order to
make us live, by using, for itself and against us, the sense of guilt,
while at the same time we must loosen its embrace in order to live and
find enjoyment.
Thus the empire of suffering is more extensive
than that of mere unpleasure: it extends to everything that makes up the
harshness of life.
What is the meaning, in
Freud
ORG
’s works, of this disparity between the diversity of suffering and the monotony of enjoyment? Does
Freud
ORG
stand in need of completion on this point? Must we somehow distinguish
as many degrees of satisfaction as there are degrees of suffering? Must
we restore the dialectic of pleasure, sketched by
Plato
PERSON
in the
Philebus
ORG
, or even the dialectic of pleasure and happiness in the manner of
Aristotle’s Ethics
WORK_OF_ART
? Or does the pessimism of pleasure make us admit that man’s capacity
for suffering is richer than his power of enjoyment? In the face of
manifold suffering, does man’s only recourse lie in unvaried enjoyment
and in bearing
the excess of suffering with resignation? I am inclined to think that the whole of
Freud
ORG
’s work tends toward
the second hypothesis
TIME
. This hypothesis brings us back to the reality principle.
WHAT IS
REALITY
ORG
?
What is, finally, the reality principle? We left the question in suspension at the end of the
first
ORDINAL
chapter, with the hope of discovering a new dimension in the concept of
reality that would correspond to the revision of the pleasure principle
imposed by the introduction of the death instinct. <
210
CARDINAL
>
<
210
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.: “In this way we obtain a small but interesting set of connections. The
Nirvana
GPE
principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure
principle represents the demands of the libido; and the modification of
the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the influence of
the external world” (
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
373
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
DATE
,
160
CARDINAL
).
Let us briefly recapitulate the earlier analysis. We started
from an elementary opposition concerning the “functioning of the
psychical apparatus.” Insofar as the pleasure principle had a simple
meaning, the reality principle likewise was without mystery.
Freud
ORG
’s direct and indirect interpretations of the reality principle are all extensions of the single line sketched by the
1911
DATE
article, “
The Two Principles of Mental Functioning”—the line of the useful
WORK_OF_ART
; whereas the pleasure principle is biologically dangerous, the useful
represents the organism’s true and proper interests. All the various
levels of meaning of the reality principle that we went on to consider
lie within the limits of this notion of utility. Thus, reality is
first
ORDINAL
of all the opposite of fantasy—it is facts, such as the normal man sees
them; it is the opposite of dreams, of hallucination. In a more
specifically analytical sense, the reality principle indicates
adaptation to time and the demands of life in society; thus reality
becomes the correlate of consciousness, and then of the ego. Whereas the
unconscious—the id—is ignorant of time and contradiction and obeys only
the pleasure principle, consciousness—the ego—has a temporal
organization and takes account of what is possible and reasonable.
As may be seen, nothing in this analysis bears a tragic accent;
nothing foreshadows the world view dominated by the struggle between
Eros
LANGUAGE
and death.
Now, what happens to this simple opposition between
desire and reality when it is shifted to the area of the new theory of
instincts? This question arises because the
first
ORDINAL
term of the pair, pleasure, vacillates in its most basic meaning, and
also because reality contains death. However, the death that reality
holds in reserve is no longer the death instinct, but my own death,
death as destiny; this is what gives reality its inexorable and tragic
sense; because of death-destiny reality is called necessity and bears
the tragic name
Ananke
PERSON
. Let us ask ourselves, then, to what extent the oldest theme of
Freudianism
NORP
—that of the double functioning of the psychical apparatus—was raised to the level of the great dramaturgy of
Freud
ORG
’s later writings.
The fact is that
Freud
ORG
’s later philosophy did not truly transform, but rather reinforced and
hardened the early characteristics of the reality principle. It is only
within very narrow and very strict limits that one may say that the
“romantic” theme of
Eros
LOC
transformed the reality principle. But this discrepancy between the relative mythicizing of
Eros
LOC
and the cold consideration of reality deserves attention and
reflection: this fine discordance reveals perhaps the essence of the
philosophical tone of
Freudianism
NORP
.
While emphasizing the dualism of
Eros
LOC
and death,
Freud
ORG
also emphasized the struggle against illusion, the last entrenchment of
the pleasure principle; he thus reinforced what might be called his
“scientific conception of the world,” the motto of which could be,
“beyond illusion and consolation.”
The last chapters of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
are very significant in this respect. Religion,
Freud
ORG
states, has no future; it has exhausted its resources of constraint and consolation. Thus the reality principle, in which
Totem
GPE
and Taboo had already recognized a stage of human history parallel to a
stage of the libido, becomes the principle that presides over the
postreligious age of culture. In this age to come, the scientific spirit
will replace religious motivation and moral prohibitions will be
motivated by social interests alone. Coming back to his earlier views
about the excessive demands of the superego,
Freud
ORG
suggests that, along with their sanctity, com-
mandments will
lose their rigidity and intolerance as well; instead of dreaming of
their abolition, it is possible that man will work toward their
improvement, finding them in the end reasonable and perhaps even
friendly.
All this might make
one
CARDINAL
think of the rationalistic and optimistic prophecies of
the last century
DATE
. But
Freud
ORG
himself objects that prohibitions have never been founded on reason but
on powerful emotional forces, such as remorse for the primal killing;
besides, was it not
Freud
ORG
who revealed the power of the destructive forces working against the ethical, and even worse, within the ethical?
Freud
ORG
is mindful of all this and will express it even more forcefully
a few years later
DATE
in
Civilization and Its
LAW
Discontents
NORP
. His timid hope is pinned to a single point: if religion is the
universal neurosis of mankind, it is partly responsible for the
intellectual retardation of mankind; it is as much the expression of the
powerful forces that arise from below as it is their educator. The
possibility of a nonreligious mankind is supported and measured by the
parallelism between the growth of mankind and the growth of the
individual: “But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men
cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into
‘hostile life.’ We may call this ‘education to reality.’ Need I confess
to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity
for this forward step?” <
211
CARDINAL
> Such is the restrained but hazardous optimism underlying this
prophecy of the positive age. Addressing himself to a hypothetical
opponent who suggests that religion be retained as a pragmatic illusion,
Freud
ORG
in his reply ventures to give the name of a god—the god Logos—to the
central idea of his sober prophecy; but I think this must be looked upon
merely as a bit of irony inserted in an ad hominem argument:
<
211
CARDINAL
>
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
373
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
49
DATE
.
The voice of the intellect is a soft
one
CARDINAL
, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally after a
countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. . . . Our god,
A0709
GPE
, will fulfill whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but
he will do it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a
new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer
griev-
ously from life. . . . Our god Aoyo? is perhaps not a
very almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfill a small part of
what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this we
shall accept it with resignation.
This kinship between
Logos
ORG
and
Ananke
PERSON
—the twin gods of the
Dutch
NORP
writer
Multatuli—
LOC
excludes all lyricism about the totality. Moreover, a proud closing
protestation is meant to set the tone for the whole book: “No, our
science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what
science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
This text leaves no doubt; reality has the same meaning at the end of
Freud
ORG
’s life as it had at the beginning: reality is the world shorn of God.
Its final meaning does not contradict but rather extends the concept of
utility, long since opposed to the fictions created by desire. This
coherence between the final and the initial meanings is borne out by the
plea for this world, on which
Freud
ORG
ends
one
CARDINAL
of the last chapters of
The Future of an Illusion.
ORG
Borrowing a couplet from
Heine
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
states: “Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers (
Unglaubensgenossen
GPE
), they will be able to say without regret:
Den Himmel
GPE
iiberlassen wir
Den Engeln
PERSON
und den Spatzen.”
The notion of reality that results from this
critique of religion is the least romantic of ideas and seems to have no
connection with the term
Eros
LOC
. Even the word
Ananke
PERSON
—as set within this context— seems to designate the visage of reality
after reality has been stripped of any analogy with the father figure.
If religious illusion stems from the father complex, the “dissolution”
of the Oedipus complex is attained only with the notion of an order of
things stripped of any paternal coefficient, an order that is anonymous
and impersonal.
Ananke
PERSON
is therefore the symbol of disillusion. This was the sense in which I believe the term made its
first
ORDINAL
appearance in
29
DATE
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
1,11-19-
PRODUCT
,
SE
PERSON
,
21
DATE
,
53-54
DATE
.
30
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
380
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
56
DATE
.
31
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
374
CARDINAL
. SE,
21
DATE
,
50
DATE
, translates
Heine
PERSON
’s verse (
Deutschland
ORG
[
Caput
ORG
I]) thus; “We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows.”
the
Leonardo
GPE
? even before
Totem and Taboo
ORG
.
Ananke
PERSON
is the name of nameless reality, for those who have “renounced their
father.” It is also chance, the absence of relationship between the laws
of nature and our desires or illusions.
Is this
Freud
ORG
’s final statement on the matter? The very expression “resignation” or “submission” to
Ananke
PERSON
points to a total wisdom that is more than the mere reality principle,
psychologically considered as the perceptual testing of reality. Is it
not the case that it is only when reality is accepted with resignation
that it becomes
Ananke
PERSON
?
Ananke
PERSON
, it seems to me, is a symbol of a world view, and not merely the symbol
of a principle of mental functioning; in it is summed up a wisdom that
dares to face the harshness of life. Such wisdom is an art of “bearing
the burden of existence,” according to
Schiller
ORG
’s remark cited in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
.
One can thus find in
Freud
PRODUCT
the sketch of a Spinozistic meaning of reality, a meaning that is
connected, as in the great philosopher, with an ascesis of desire
restricted to the body’s perspective and with an ascesis of the
imaginative knowledge arising from that perspective; is not necessity
the
second
ORDINAL
kind of knowledge, knowledge according to reason? And if there is in
Freud—
FAC
we shall go on to discuss this point—the
first
ORDINAL
step of a reconciliation in the form of resignation, is this not an echo of the
third
ORDINAL
kind of knowledge? This sketch, it is true, is so little developed
philosophically, that one might just as well speak of a love of fate in a
Nietzschean
NORP
sense. The touchstone of the reality principle, thus interpreted
philosophically, would be the victory of the love of the whole over my
narcissism, over my fear of dying, over the resurgence in me of
childhood consolations.
Let us essay this “
second
ORDINAL
wave,” as Plato would have said, taking as our clue the gap the
previous analysis kept widening—in spite of the continuity of
meaning—between mere perceptual reality-testing and resignation to the
inexorable order of nature. Without forcing the texts, I wish simply to
gather together certain remarks, certain signs and tentative
indications, that broaden this respect for nature in such a way that the
reality principle is brought more in harmony with the themes of
Eros
LOC
and death.
32
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
197
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
125
CARDINAL
.
Perhaps the most direct approach to the theme of resignation
is through the question of death, or rather of dying. Resignation is
basically a working upon desire that incorporates into desire the
necessity of dying. Reality, insofar as it portends my death, is going
to enter into desire itself.
In
1899
CARDINAL
Freud
ORG
recalled the phrase of
Shakespeare
PERSON
: “Thou owest
Nature
WORK_OF_ART
a death.” He alludes to it again at
the beginning of the second essay
DATE
of
“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,”
WORK_OF_ART
written shortly after the outbreak of
World War I.
EVENT
The natural tendency of desire, he explains, is to put death to
one
CARDINAL
side, to exclude it from the purview of life; desire has the conviction
of its own immortality. Such an attitude is an aspect of the absence of
contradiction in the unconscious. And so we disguise death in
innumerable ways, reducing it from a necessity to a chance event. But in
return, “life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest
stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked.” Thus
paralyzed, when we exclude death from life, we no longer understand the
proud motto of
the Hanseatic League
ORG
: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse (“It is necessary to sail the
seas, it is not necessary to live”). We content ourselves with dying
fictionally with our heroes of literature and the theater, while
preserving our fives intact.
When
Freud
PERSON
wrote these fines he had in mind the fie war deals to this conventional
treatment of death; and he dared to write: “Life has, indeed, become
interesting again; it has recovered its full content.” Of course,
Freud
ORG
knew how odious a remark from the home front, from a noncombatant,
could be. What mattered to him was the attainment—through the cruelty of
the remark—of truthfulness. When death is acknowledged as the
termination of life, finite life recovers its significance.
But
the recognition of death is obscured by the fear of death no less than
by the disbelief on the part of our unconscious concerning our own
death; the fear of death has a different source: it is a by-
33
CARDINAL
.
Letter 104
PERSON
, Origins, p.
276
CARDINAL
. The actual line in
Shakespeare
PERSON
runs: “
Thou
GPE
owest God a death”
(/ Henry IV
WORK_OF_ART
,
V.
PERSON
i.
126
CARDINAL
).
34
CARDINAL
. “Zeitgemiisses iiber
Krieg und Tod
ORG
,”
GW, 10
WORK_OF_ART
,
324
CARDINAL
-55; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
215300
DATE
.
36
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
343
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
291
CARDINAL
.
product of the sense of guilt. <
212
CARDINAL
> At the end of The Ego and the Id,
Freud
ORG
will state even more firmly: “I believe that the fear of death is
something that occurs between the ego and the superego. . . . These
considerations make it possible to regard the fear of death, like the
fear of conscience, as a development [Verarbeitung] of the fear of
castration.” <
213
CARDINAL
> The fear of death is therefore no less an obstacle than the
invulnerability of the unconscious which proclaims, “Nothing can happen
to me.” If it be added, finally, that we quite readily put to death
enemies and strangers, it appears that the number of inauthentic
attitudes in the face of death is considerable; the immorality of the
id, the fear of death stemming from guilt, the urge to kill—these are so
many screens between the destined meaning of death and ourselves.
One
CARDINAL
thus sees that the acceptance of death is a task: Si vis vitam, para
mortem. If you want to endure life, be prepared for death. <
214
CARDINAL
>
<
212
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
350
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
297
CARDINAL
.
<
213
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
289
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
58
DATE
.
<
214
CARDINAL
> “
Thoughts on War and Death
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW, 10
WORK_OF_ART
,
355
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
300
CARDINAL
.
But then, just what is resignation?
The integration of death into life is symbolically proposed to us by “
The Theme of the Three Caskets
WORK_OF_ART
,” <
215
CARDINAL
> that admirable short essay
Ernest Jones
PERSON
was so fond of. The
third
ORDINAL
casket, neither of gold nor silver but of lead, contains the portrait
of the bride; the suitor who chooses it will also have the beautiful
girl as his wife. But if the caskets are women, according to a
well-known dream symbol, cannot this comic theme be related to the
tragic theme of old King Lear who, to his own ruin, does not choose the
third
ORDINAL
daughter,
Cordelia
PERSON
, who was the only one that really loved him? A survey of folklore and literature discloses a series of “the choice of the
third
ORDINAL
woman”: the Aphrodite of the Judgment of
Paris
GPE
,
Cinderella
PERSON
, the
Psyche
ORG
of
Apuleius
GPE
. . . But who is the
third
ORDINAL
woman? The fairest one, of course, but also the one who “loves and is
silent.” Now, in dreams, dumbness is a common symbol of death. Hence,
are not the
three
CARDINAL
sisters the
Moerae
ORG
, the
Fates
ORG
, the
third
ORDINAL
of whom is called Atropos, the inexorable? If the comparison is correct, “the
third
ORDINAL
woman” signifies that man realizes the full seriousness of the laws
<
215
QUANTITY
> “
Das Motiv der Kastchenwahl
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
24-37
DATE
; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
-301.
of nature only when he has to submit to them by accepting his own death.
It will be objected, however, that no one chooses death, nor did
Paris
GPE
choose death, but the most beautiful of women! Substitution, replies
Freud
ORG
: our wishes substitute for death its contrary, beauty, perhaps in
accordance with the confusion of contraries in the unconscious; but
above all in accordance with the primeval identity of life and death
preserved in the myth of
the Great Goddess
EVENT
. But if the most beautiful woman is the substitute for death, what does
it mean to choose death? Again a substitution, under the dominance of
desire: instead of accepting the worst, we substitute the choice of the
best.
Freud
ORG
’s answer merits quotation:
Here again there has been a wishful
reversal. Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this
way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No
greater triumph of wish-fulfillment is conceivable. A choice is made
where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen
is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.
If, then,
Shakespeare
PERSON
achieves a profound effect upon us in King Lear, it is because he has
known how to revert to the primeval myth: if one does not choose the
fairest woman,
one
CARDINAL
is necessarily driven to the
third
ORDINAL
, to unhappiness and death. But that is not all: the relation between death and woman is still not clear; once again it is
Shakespeare
PERSON
who discloses it: Lear is both the lover and the dying man: Lear is
doomed to death, yet he insists on being told how much he is loved. What
is, then, the relation between death and woman? The
third
ORDINAL
woman, we said, is death; but if the
third
ORDINAL
woman is death, one must also say, conversely, that death is the
third
ORDINAL
woman, the
third
ORDINAL
form or figure of woman: after the mother, after the beloved mate chosen on the pattern of the mother, finally “
the Mother Earth
WORK_OF_ART
who receives him once more.” Does this mean that man can “choose death and make friends
with the necessity of dying” <
216
CARDINAL
> only through regression to the mother figure? Or is it to be
understood that the woman figure must become the figure of death for
man, so as to cease being fantasy and regression?
Freud
ORG
’s final words do not provide a clear answer: “But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it
first
ORDINAL
from his mother: the
third
ORDINAL
of the
Fates
ORG
alone, the silent
Goddess of Death
PRODUCT
, will take him into her arms.” <217><218>
<
216
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
217
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
218
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
, pp.
163
CARDINAL
-77.
Of course, one might add, along the lines of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
, that the true acceptance of death is distinct from a regressive return
in fantasy to the mother’s breast only if that acceptance has stood the
test of a scientific view of the world. I think this is
Freud
ORG
’s actual thought. Even in a
Freudian
NORP
perspective, however, the answer does not completely exhaust the
problem; resignation to the ineluctable is not reducible to a mere
knowledge of necessity, i.e. to a purely intellectual extension of what
we called perceptual reality-testing; resignation is an affective task, a
work of correction applied to the very core of the libido, to the heart
of narcissism. Consequently, the scientific world view must be
incorporated into a history of desire.
The appeal to the poets, to
Shakespeare
PERSON
in King Lear, invites us to try another path equally familiar to
Freud
ORG
, the path of art. We did not exhaust the resources of
Freud
ORG
’s esthetics when we treated the work of art from the standpoint of
artistic creation. Because of its analogical character, the
investigation of esthetic phenomena remained cautious and fragmentary:
the work of art entered the field of psychoanalysis as the analogue of
dreams and the neuroses. Nevertheless we did gain
two
CARDINAL
insights into the specificity of works of art: by means of the
forepleasure (or pleasure bonus) that the artist’s technique offers us,
profound sources of tension are liberated; on the other hand, through
symbolism, the fantasies of the abolished past are recreated in
the light of day
DATE
.
If we now take up these fragmentary insights from the point of
view of the task of culture defined above—to diminish instinctual
charges, to reconcile the individual with the ineluctable, to com-
pensate
for irreparable losses through substitute satisfactions—it is
reasonable to ask whether art, now considered from the standpoint of the
user or viewer, does not derive its meaning from its intermediate
position between illusion represented by religion and reality
represented by science. Might it not be that the task of reconciliation
and compensation, withdrawn from religion, devolves upon this
intermediate function? Is not art an aspect of the education to reality
spoken of in
the 1911
DATE
article, “
The Two Principles of Mental Functioning
WORK_OF_ART
”?
To understand the esthetic function in
Freud
ORG
, one would have to locate the exact place of the seduction or charm of
the work of art on the path leading from the pleasure principle to the
reality principle. It is certain that
Freud
ORG
’s severity toward religion is equaled only by his sympathy for the
arts. Illusion is the way of regression, the “return of the repressed.”
Art, on the contrary, is the nonobses-sional, non-neurotic form of
substitute satisfaction; the “charm” of esthetic creations does not stem
from the memory of parricide. We recall our earlier analysis of
forepleasure or the incentive bonus: the artist’s technique creates a
formal or esthetic pleasure which brings about a general lowering of the
thresholds of inhibition and thereby enables us to enjoy our fantasies
without shame.
No Active
ORG
restoration of the father enters in here to make us regress toward the
submissive state of childhood. Instead, we play with the resistances and
impulses and in this way achieve a general relaxation of our conflicts.
Freud
ORG
comes very close here to the cathartic tradition of
Plato and Aristotle
ORG
.
What is the relation, then, between esthetic seduction and the reality principle?
Freud
ORG
explicitly treats this point in the
1911
DATE
article. In Paragraph 6 he says that art brings about a reconciliation between the
two
CARDINAL
principles in a peculiar way: the artist, like the neurotic, is a man
who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the
renunciation of instinctual satisfaction that reality demands, and who
transposes his erotic and ambitious desires to the plane of fantasy and
play. By means of his special gifts, however, he finds a way back to
reality from this world of fantasy: he creates a new reality, the work
of art, in which he himself be-
comes the hero, the king, the creator he desired to be,
without having to follow the roundabout path of making real alterations
in the external world. In this new reality other men feel at home
because they “feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the
renunciation demanded by reality, and because that satisfaction, which
results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality
principle, is itself part of reality.”
As may be seen, if art
initiates the reconciliation between the pleasure and the reality
principles, it does so mainly on the basis of the pleasure principle. In
spite of his great sympathy for the arts,
Freud
ORG
has none for what might be described as an esthetic world view. Just as
he distinguishes esthetic seduction from religious illusion, so too he
lets it be understood that the esthetic—or, to be more exact, the
esthetic world view—goes only halfway toward the awesome education to
necessity required by the harshness of life and the knowledge of death,
an education impeded by our incorrigible narcissism and by our thirst
for childhood consolation.
I will give
only one
CARDINAL
or
two
CARDINAL
indications of this. In his interpretation of humor, at the end of his book
Jokes and the Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
(
1905
DATE
),
Freud
ORG
seemed to make much of the ability to create pleasure as a substitute
for the release of painful affects. The humor that smiles through tears,
and even the dreadful gallows humor (according to which the rogue, who
was being led out to execution on a
Monday
DATE
, says: “Well, this
week
DATE
’s beginning nicely”) seemed to have some credit in his eyes.
Interpreted economically, the pleasure of humor arises from an economy
in the expenditure of painful feelings. Yet, a brief remark in the
1905
DATE
text sets us on guard:
We can only say that if someone succeeds,
for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by reflecting on the
greatness of the interests of the world as compared with his own
smallness, we do not regard this as an achievement of humor but of
philosophical thought, and if we put ourselves into this train of
thought, we obtain no yield of pleasure.
In
1927
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
wrote a separate short paper entitled “
Humor
WORK_OF_ART
,” which is much more severe, and in which he extends humor to
47. Jokes and the Unconscious,
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
266
CARDINAL
; SE,
8
CARDINAL
,
233
CARDINAL
.
48
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
383
CARDINAL
-89; SE,
21
DATE
,
161
CARDINAL
-66.
all the sentiments of the sublime.
Humor
GPE
elevates us above misfortune only by saving our narcissism from disaster:
The
grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the
victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be
distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled
to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the
external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than
occasions for it to gain pleasure. . . .
Humor
GPE
is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of
the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to
assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.
And
where does humor get this power of withdrawal and rebellion? From the
superego, which condescends to allow the ego a small yield of pleasure.
Freud
PERSON
concludes: “In bringing about the humorous attitude, the superego is
actually repudiating reality and serving an illusion. . . . And finally,
if the superego tries, by means of humor, to console the ego and
protect it from suffering, this does not contradict its origin in the
parental agency.”
I am well aware that one cannot judge the whole
of art and all of the arts by such a narrow feeling as humor. Still, we
had found that humor seems to be a point where the pleasure of esthetic
seduction borders on philosophical resignation. It is precisely at this
point that
Freud
ORG
opposes a strong negation, as if he said to us: The acceptance of life and death? Yes, but not so cheaply! Everything in
Freud
ORG
implies that true resignation to necessity, active and personal
resignation, is the great work of life and that such a work is not of an
esthetic nature.
But if art cannot take the place of wisdom, it
does lead to it in its own way. The symbolic resolution of conflicts
through art, the transfer of desires and hatreds to the plane of play,
daydreams, and poetry, borders on resignation; prior to wisdom, while
waiting for wisdom, the symbolic mode proper to the work of art enables
us to endure the harshness of life, and, suspended between illusion and
reality, helps us to love fate.
Let us make a final effort to reach the undiscoverable point in
Freud
ORG
’s work where his early and unchanged views concerning the
reality principle would be rejoined by his later views concerning the struggle between Eros and Death. Must we leave these
two
CARDINAL
lines of thought unconnected—the
one
CARDINAL
which I will call the path of disillusion, the other that of the love
of life? Is it possible that the acceptance of reality has nothing to do
with “the battle of the giants'”? If the meaning of culture is a
struggle of the human species for existence, if love is to be the
stronger of the
two
CARDINAL
, what is the meaning of the acceptance of death in relation to the enterprise of
Eros
LOC
? Does not the acceptance of death have to overcome a final counterfeit
which would be precisely the death instinct, the wish to die, against
which
Eros
NORP
is aimed?
I see nothing explicit along these lines in
Freud
ORG
’s writings except for some early allusions in the
Leonardo
GPE
and a few remarks in The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its
Discontents
NORP
.
Leonardo
GPE
’s conversion of libido into intellectual curiosity, into the scientific
investigation of the external world, teaches us that the force of
reflection must express the power of loving, for otherwise it will kill
the libido and itself fall into decline;
Leonardo
GPE
himself neither lived nor created according to the standard of the hymn
he addresses to “the sublime law of nature (O mirabile necessita).”
4
CARDINAL
!) Whereas Faust transformed intellectual curiosity back into an enjoyment of life,
Leonardo
GPE
devoted himself to investigation rather than to loving; and
Freud
ORG
observes: “Leonardo’s development approaches
Spinoza
PERSON
’s mode of thinking” <219><220>—which would imply that
Freud
ORG
was not satisfied with
Spinoza
PERSON
’s intellectual love. He continues:
<
219
CARDINAL
>
Leonardo
GPE
,
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
141
CARDINAL
-42; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
75
DATE
.
<
220
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Lost in admiration and filled with true humility, he all too
easily forgets that he himself is a part of those active forces and that
in accordance with the scale of his personal strength the way is open
for him to try and alter a small portion of the destined course of the
world—a world in which the small is still no less wonderful and
significant than the great. <
221
CARDINAL
>
<
221
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
142
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
76
DATE
.
Does this mean that the knowledge of necessity, separated from
Eros
LOC
, is also lost in an impasse? Is the sublimation of the libido into
the instinct for research, as in the case of
Leonardo
GPE
, already a betrayal of
Eros
LOC
? Which is the true twin of
Ananke
PERSON
—is it Logos, as described at the end of
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
, or
Eros
ORDINAL
, as implied in the
Leonardo
GPE
? Should we not once again pay heed to the old androgynous myths, evoked
in the Leonardo,52 which signify the primal creative force of nature?
Do they not say the same thing as the myth of the
Symposium
GPE
, cited at length in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
, the myth of the primeval confusion of the sexes? In short, does not
Eros
NORP
strive to convert the reality principle also, just as it transformed the pleasure principle? Let us listen once more to the
Leonardo
GPE
:
We all still show too little respect for
Nature
WORK_OF_ART
which (in the obscure words of
Leonardo
GPE
which recall
Hamlet
ORG
’s lines) “is full of countless causes that never enter experience.” (
La
ORG
natura e piena d’infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza.) Every one of us human beings corresponds to
one
CARDINAL
of the countless experiments in which these ragioni of nature force their way into experience.
This was the final statement of the
Leonardo
GPE
.
If these lines have a meaning, do they not say that what is
greater than the reality principle, understood as the scientific view of
the world, is the respect for nature and for the “countless causes”
that “force their way into experience”? But nothing indicates that
Freud
ORG
finally harmonized the theme of the reality principle with the theme of
Eros
LANGUAGE
—the first being an essentially critical theme directed against archaic objects and illusions, the
second
ORDINAL
an essentially lyrical theme of the love of life and thus a theme directed against the death instinct. In
Freudianism
ORG
there is undoubtedly no “beyond the reality principle,” as there is a
“beyond the pleasure principle”; but there is a concurrence of scientism
and romanticism.
Freud
ORG
’s philosophical temperament consists perhaps in this delicate
equilibrium —or subtle conflict?—between lucidity free of illusion and
the love of life. It is perhaps in the resignation to death that this
equilibrium finds its most fragile expression; but here death figures
twice and
52.
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
162-68
DATE
; SE,
11
DATE
,
93-98
DATE
.
53
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
210
CARDINAL
-11; SE,
11
DATE
,
137
CARDINAL
.
with different meanings: lucidity without illusion invites me to accept my death, that is to say, to regard it as
one
CARDINAL
of the necessities of blind nature; but
Eros
LOC
, which wishes to unite all things, calls upon me to struggle against
the human instinct of aggression and selfdestruction, hence never to
love death, but to love life, in spite of my death. It would seem that
Freud
ORG
never unified his early world view, expressed from the beginning in the
alternation of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, with
the new world view, expressed by the struggle of
Eros
LOC
and
Thanatos
ORG
. That is why he is neither
Spinoza
PERSON
nor
Nietzsche
ORG
.
Let us give
Freud
ORG
the last word—which is also his concluding remark in Civilization and Its Discontents:
“And now it is to be expected that the other of the
two
CARDINAL
‘Heavenly Powers,’ eternal
Eros
PERSON
, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.” <
222
CARDINAL
>
<
222
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
,
506
CARDINAL
; SE,
21
DATE
,
145
CARDINAL
. In
1931
DATE
, when the menace of
Hitler
PERSON
was beginning to be apparent,
Freud
ORG
added a final sentence terminating the work in the
second
ORDINAL
edition: “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?” (
Ibid
PERSON
.)
BOOK III Dialectic:
A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud
LAW
Dialectic
NORP
: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud
Our reading of
Freud
ORG
is nearly finished. Our debate with
Freud
ORG
begins. It is reasonable to expect that it will answer the questions left suspended at the end of
Book I.
PERSON
But we now see how extensive is the question and how naive the
expectation of a quick and ready answer. We are asking philosophy to do
two
CARDINAL
things at once: to arbitrate the war
between two
CARDINAL
opposed hermeneutics and to integrate into philosophic reflection the entire process of interpretation.
Two
CARDINAL
things, then: to replace an antithesis that left the opposing parties
external to one another, with a dialectic in which they are
interrelated; simultaneously, and by means of that dialectic, to move
from abstract to concrete reflection. But the great philosophy of
language and imagination that would give us the integrating principle is
not within reach. It is too easily said that symbols carry within
themselves, in their overdetermined semantic texture, the possibility of
various interpretations, an interpretation that reduces them to their
instinctual basis and an interpretation that develops the complete
intentionality of their symbolic meaning. This proposition is not a
self-evident statement, but is rather the setting of a task. In order to
see its truth, one must attain the level of thought on which this
synthesis can be understood. That is why I have conceived this dialectic
as a patient progression through a series of graduated points of view.
First
ORDINAL
, a chapter will be devoted to an examination of the epistemological status of
Freudian
NORP
psycholanalysis. A philosophic inter- <
223
CARDINAL
>
<
223
CARDINAL
> I have purposely reserved for
the “Dialectic”
EVENT
the study of several important texts on psychoanalytic technique, and
of certain problems, such as sublimation, in the belief that they would
stand out more clearly in the new context of
the “Dialectic.
ORG
”
pretation must begin with an arbitration at the level of a
logic of experience; what is at stake here is the meaning of the
statements of psychoanalysis with respect to their validity and limits.
If the limits of analytic explanation are given in the structure of its
theory and not in some decree proscribing its extension to this or that
sphere of human experience, then the search for the philosophical locus
of psychoanalysis is subordinate to the understanding of its theoretical
structure. The comparison we will make with scientific psychology on
the one hand and phenomenology on the other is aimed at determining, by a
method of difference, the place of analytic experience in the total
field of human experience.
Secondly
ORDINAL
, moving to a properly philosophical level, we will ask ourselves
whether a philosophy of reflection can account for the realist and
naturalist concepts that, in
Freudian
NORP
theory, govern this sui generis experience. The guiding concept in this
reflective step will be an archeology of the subject. This is not a
concept elaborated by psychoanalysis itself; it is rather a concept that
reflective thought forms in order to secure a philosophical ground for
analytic discourse. At the same time, reflective thought itself
undergoes change by incorporating into itself the discourse of its own
archeology; instead of abstract reflection, it starts to become concrete
reflection.
Thirdly
ORDINAL
, an archeology remains abstract so long as it is not integrated by way
of “complementary opposition” with a teleology, with a progressive
synthesizing of figures or categories, where the meaning of each is
clarified by the meaning of further figures or categories, on the
pattern of the
Hegelian
NORP
phenomenology. Thus a
third
ORDINAL
level is formed, which is properly dialectical; it is at this level that the possibility of interrelating
two
CARDINAL
opposed hermeneutics comes into view; regression and progression are henceforth understood as
two
CARDINAL
possible directions of interpretation, opposed but complementary. This
level of thought is sufficiently important to give its name to the
third
ORDINAL
book—“Dialectic.” Still, its importance should not be overestimated.
The point of view presented at this level is indeed central, but it is
only a transition; the function of a dialectic between regression and
progression, between archeology and teleology, is to lead from a
reflection that understands its archeology to a
symbolic
understanding that would grasp the indivisible unity of its archeology
and its teleology in the very origin of speech. The dialectic is not
everything; it is only a procedure that reflection uses in order to
overcome its abstraction and make itself concrete or complete.
Fourthly
ORDINAL
, I have given the final chapter the subtitle, “The Approaches to Symbol.” This subtitle explains the title “
Hermeneutics
WORK_OF_ART
.” I do not mean to give the impression that we are at present able to
write the general hermeneutics that would reconcile the opposing
interpretations; I wish to contribute to that general hermeneutics by
trying to resolve some aporias in psychoanalytic interpretation, such as
sublimation. The solution I propose to this aporia is only exploratory;
but at least it will enable me to attempt a new formulation of the
problem that lies at the origin of this book, namely, the
conflict—within myself and within contemporary culture—between a
hermeneutics that demystifies religion and a hermeneutics that tries to
grasp, in the symbols of faith, a possible call or kerygma. It is only
at the very end, therefore, that I glimpse the approaches to the
solution of a problem that arose at the beginning of my research. It is
at the end that one sees not only how large the question was, but also
how naive our demand was for an answer. If the journey to the point of
departure is so toilsome, it is because the concrete is the final
conquest of thought.
Chapter 1:
LAW
Epistemology:
Between Psychology and Phenomenology
WORK_OF_ART
In this
first
ORDINAL
chapter I return to the problems of method discussed in Part I of the “
Analytic
NORP
.” There we made an internal examination of
Freudian
NORP
discourse, without trying to locate it within the whole range of
discourse about human experience. We are now in a position to confront
Freud
ORG
’s discourse with other types of discourse and to justify, with respect to them, its central paradox.
We will take
two
CARDINAL
reference points external to psychoanalysis, scientific psychology on the one hand, phenomenology on the other.
This is not a matter of setting up a balanced comparison and making psychoanalysis oscillate between the
two
CARDINAL
poles. The
two
CARDINAL
phases of the comparison involve a definite progression. If we are to grasp the comparison with phenomenology, we must
first
ORDINAL
understand the difference between psychoanalysis and scientific psychology, the subject of the
first
ORDINAL
two
CARDINAL
sections. This
first
ORDINAL
confrontation aims above all at doing away with a misunderstanding; it
is a question of resisting the temptation to blend psychoanalysis into a
general psychology along behaviorist lines; as I see it, such a fusion
is a confusion that must be rejected. The
second
ORDINAL
confrontation has a completely different aim and goes much further; it
consists in a gradual approximation, by means of the phenomenological
method, to what is truly proper to psychoanalysis. Phenomenology
likewise fails to produce the equivalent of analytic experience, but
this failure, instead of being a misunderstanding, brings to light a
difference at the end of an approximation.
The scientific status of psychoanalysis has been subjected to severe criticism, especially in countries of
British
NORP
and
American
NORP
culture. Epistemologists, logicians, seman-ticists, philosophers of
language have closely examined its concepts, propositions,
argumentation, and structure as a theory and have generally come to the
conclusion that psychoanalysis does not satisfy the most elementary
requirements of a scientific theory.
The analysts have answered
either by flight, or by the adduction of additional scientific criteria
for their discipline, or by attempts at “reformulation” aimed at making
it acceptable to men of science. By so doing, they have skirted the
“agonizing revision” called for, I believe, by the
logicians’
ORG
critique and which I will express as follows: “No, psychoanalysis is
not a science of observation; it is an interpretation, more comparable
to history than to psychology.” Let us consider,
one
CARDINAL
by
one
CARDINAL
, the criticisms of the logicians, the reformulations internal to
psychoanalysis, and finally the reformulations proposed from without.
The Critique of the
Logicians
NORP
. I purposely begin with the most devastating critique, presented by
Ernest Nagel
PERSON
at a symposium held in
New York
GPE
in
1958
DATE
on the theme of
Psychoanalysis
PRODUCT
,
Scientific Method
PERSON
and Philosophy.
If psychoanalysis is a “theory,” in the sense of
the molecular theory of gases or the gene theory in biology, i.e. a set
of propositions that systematizes, explains, and predicts certain
observable phenomena, then it must satisfy the same logical criteria as
other theories in the natural or social sciences.
In the
first
ORDINAL
place, it must be capable of empirical verification. This assumes that it is possible to deduce determinate consequences
1
DATE
.
Ernest Nagel
PERSON
,
“Methodological Issues in Psychoanalytic Theory
ORG
,” in
Psychoanalysis
GPE
,
Scientific Method
PERSON
and Philosophy, a symposium edited by
Sidney Hook
PERSON
(
New York
GPE
,
New York University Press
ORG
,
1959
DATE
), pp.
38-56
DATE
. This study was in reply to the methodological paper presented by
Heinz Hartmann
PERSON
, “
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
as a
Scientific Theory
ORG
,” ibid., pp.
3-37
DATE
.
from its propositions; otherwise the theory has no definite
content. In addition, there must be some specific rules of procedure
(variously called “correspondence rules,” “coordinating definitions,” or
“operational definitions”), so that at least some theoretical notions
may be tied down to definite and unambiguous facts.
However, the energy notions of
Freudian
NORP
theory are so vague and metaphorical that it seems impossible to deduce
from them any determinate conclusions; such notions may well be
suggestive, but they cannot be empirically verified; further, any
coordination with facts of behavior is clouded over with an invincible
ambiguity, to such an extent that it is impossible to state on what
conditions the theory could be refuted.
Secondly
ORDINAL
, if the theory is to be regarded as valid, its empirical validation
must satisfy the requirements of a logic of proof. Interpretation is
said to be its main method (along with confirmation by child development
studies and ethnology). However, on what conditions is an
interpretation valid? Is it valid because it is coherent, because it is
accepted by the patient, because it improves the condition of the
patient? But a given interpretation must
first
ORDINAL
be characterized by objectivity; this means that a number of
independent inquirers have access to the same data obtained under
carefully standardized circumstances. Next, there must be some objective
procedures to decide between rival interpretations. Further, the
interpretation must lead to verifiable predictions. But, psychoanalysis
is not in a position to meet these requirements: its data are enmeshed
in the individual relationship of the analyst to the analysand;
one
CARDINAL
cannot dispel the suspicion that interpretations are forced upon the
data by the interpreter, for want of a comparative procedure and
statistical investigation. Finally, the allegations of psychoanalysts
concerning the effectiveness of therapy do not satisfy the minimum rules
of verification; since the percentages of improvement cannot be
strictly established or even defined by some kind of “before and after”
study, the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis cannot be
compared with that of some other method
2
PRODUCT
. This argument is developed by
Michael Scriven
PERSON
, “
The Experimental Investigation of Psychoanalysis
ORG
,” ibid., pp.
226-51
CARDINAL
.
or treatment, or even with the ratio of spontaneous cures. For
these reasons, the criterion of therapeutic success is unusable. <
224
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
224
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., pp.
228
CARDINAL
,
234-35
DATE
.
The Internal Attempts at Reformulation
ORG
. As long as
one
CARDINAL
tries to place psychoanalysis among the observational sciences, the
preceding attack against psychoanalysis seems to me unanswerable. In
order to meet the above requirements, certain psychoanalysts have tried
to reformulate the theory in terms acceptable to “academic psychology.”
Some supporters of that psychology have lent them a hand, not without
mixing suspicion with their willingness, and at times with the sincere
desire to integrate certain facts and concepts of psychoanalysis into
scientific psychology, at the cost of what some have called an
“operational reconversion.” This attempt comes, moreover, at a moment
when the demise of theories is a general phenomenon in the sciences
concerned with man.
It is all the more urgent, therefore, to pinpoint just where the original
Freudian
NORP
theory resists these attempts. What resists the reformulation is
precisely the hybrid character of psychoanalysis: namely, the fact that
it arrives at its energy concepts solely by way of interpretation.
Because of this mixed nature, analytic interpretation will always seem
an anomaly in the human sciences.
Let us see how far we can go along these lines. <
225
CARDINAL
>
of Psychoanalytic Theories
ORG
,
” Scientific Monthly
WORK_OF_ART
,
79
CARDINAL
(
1954
DATE
),
293-300
CARDINAL
; “
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
and
the Unity of Science
ORG
,” Proc. of the Am. Acad, of
Arts and Sciences
ORG
,
80
DATE
(
1954
DATE
).
Loewenstein
PERSON
, “
Some Thoughts on Interpretation in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,”
The Psychoanal
WORK_OF_ART
. Study of the Child, 12 (
1957
DATE
).
David Rapaport
PERSON
and
Merton Gill
PERSON
, “
The Points of View and Assumptions of Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
,” Int. J. Psychoanal.,
40
CARDINAL
(
1959
DATE
). And especially
Rapaport
GPE
,
“The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory:
WORK_OF_ART
A Systematizing Attempt,” in
S. Koch
PERSON
, ed., Psychology: A
Study of a Science
ORG
,
3
CARDINAL
(
New York
GPE
,
McGraw-Hill
ORG
,
1958
DATE
),
55
CARDINAL
-183.
First
ORDINAL
of all, the reformulation must be carried out at the level of the most
general presuppositions that make psychology a factual science.
Rapaport
GPE
states
three
CARDINAL
theses that place the facts of psychoanalysis among the “observables” of scientific psychology: <
226
CARDINAL
>
<
226
CARDINAL
>
Hartmann
PERSON
, in
Hook
GPE
, ed.,
Psychoanalysis
FAC
,
Scientific Method
PERSON
and Philosophy, pp.
3-16
CARDINAL
. Rapaport, “
The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory
ORG
,” in
Koch
PERSON
, ed., Psychology,
3
CARDINAL
,
82
CARDINAL
-104.
Rapaport
GPE
’s work is very significant; since he had to follow Dr.
Koch
PERSON
’s outline of questions, he had to pose some questions to psychoanalysis
that are foreign to that discipline, such as the role of “independent,
intervening, and dependent variables” and the “quantification” of its
laws.
First
ORDINAL
, the subject matter of psychoanalysis, we shall say, is behavior; in
this respect psychoanalysis does not differ basically from the
“empirical point of view” of other psychologies except secondarily,
because of its stress on “latent” behavior.
Second
ORDINAL
, psychoanalysis shares the “gestalt point of view” that has conquered
the whole of modern psychology; according to this viewpoint all behavior
is integrated and indivisible. Hence the “systems” and “agencies” (ego,
id, superego) are not “entities,” but aspects of behavior; a behavior
is said to be “overdetermined” when it can be related to several
structures and submitted to multiple levels of analysis.
Third
ORDINAL
, all behavior is that of the integral personality; in spite of the
accusations of atomism and mechanism, psychoanalysis satisfies the
“organismic point of view” by reason of all the interconnections it
establishes between the systems and agencies of the subject.
If
one
CARDINAL
admits that psychoanalysis can be assimilated, on the level of the “facts” themselves, to these
three
CARDINAL
“points of view” ordinarily assumed by scientific psychology, it is
likewise possible to reformulate the “models” used by analytic theory
and to assimilate them to
the points of view familiar to academic psychology. <
227
CARDINAL
> It is interesting to split
Freud
ORG
’s metapsychology into a group of “distinct models,” with the aim of later reuniting them in a “combined model.”
The topographic point of view is thus compared to the
reflex-arc model: the psychical apparatus responds by way of distinct
parts.
The economic point of view, in turn, is an aspect of the
entropy model: from tension to tension-reduction. All motivated
behaviors may be placed under this model; its
first
ORDINAL
application is the
Wunsch
GPE
-erfiillung and the pleasure principle and, indirectly, the reality
principle itself, so far as the latter remains a mere detour employed by
the pleasure principle.
The theory of stages and the role of fixation and regression come under a genetic point of view; moreover, with the help of
Haeckel
GPE
’s biogenetic law, it is possible to make phylogeny and ontogeny coincide, as is seen in
Totem
GPE
and
Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
. Because of this genetic model, psychoanalysis may be compared to
learning theories, although it differs from them in its greater emphasis
on the role and weight of early experiences in human experience. But in
its own peculiar way, it has developed along the lines of learning
theory, as in its investigation of object-choice and in its evolutional
history of the systems ego and superego.
Finally,
Freud
ORG
may be said to have used a
Jacksonian
NORP
model: the systems form a hierarchy of integrations, with the higher
systems inhibiting or controlling the lower. This model obviously served
as the basis for superposing the secondary system on the primary system
and for the related notions of censorship, defense, and repression. In
this sense, it is the most important model; the topographic, economic,
and genetic points of view are associated with this
Jacksonian
NORP
model in all the
Freudian
NORP
concepts involving the notion of conflict. <
228
CARDINAL
>
(affect discharge, e.g. anxiety). Next, we have the
secondary
ORDINAL
system that superimposes its control and defense structures;
anticathexis is thus another name for the integrative control of the
Jacksonian
NORP
model; the heightening by anticathexes of the original thresholds assures the “functional autonomy” —to use
Allport
PERSON
’s term—of those “structures” which have a slow rate of change and which
Freud
ORG
calls systems or agencies. At the same time the structural point of
view reacts on the entropic point of view, since the maintenance of
higher structures and their autonomy require not a systematic and
general reduction of all tensions, but discharges compatible with the
maintenance of tensions appropriate to the maintenance of the control
structures.
Thus are preserved the main points of
the “Project” of 1895
EVENT
,
Chapter 7
LAW
of the
Traumdeutung
GPE
,
“Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
,” and the book
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
ORG
.
These models can be likened to certain points of view universally assumed by
present-day
DATE
psychologists:
1
CARDINAL
. All behavior, we shall say, is part of a genetic series.
Lewin
PERSON
’s genotypes and phenotypes come under this same genetic point of view;
Freud
ORG
’s contribution was to relate the genetic point of view to the economic point of view.
2
CARDINAL
. All behavior involves unconscious “crucial determinants.” All psychologies deal with unnoticed conditions; but
Freud
ORG
the-matizes what is unnoticed, infers it by a method of investigation,
discovers the peculiar laws of those factors, thus distinguishing
between what can and what cannot become noticeable; at the same time he
treats both groups of factors in terms of psychology, not biology.
It was to account for these facts that
Freud
ORG
worked out the topographic point of view (unconscious, preconscious,
conscious), and then the structural point of view (id, ego, superego);
but this transition, like the technique of handling conflicts, was
already implied in the notions of primary and secondary systems. In
turn, the structural point of view, with its use of anticathexis,
foreshadows the development of recent ego psychology. <
229
CARDINAL
>
<
229
CARDINAL
> “The genetic character of the psychoanalytic theory is ubiquitous
in its literature. The concept of 'complementary series’ is probably the
clearest expression of it: each behavior is part of a historical
sequence shaped both by epigenetic laws and experience; each step in
this sequence contributed to the shaping of the behavior and has
dynamic, economic, structural, and contextual-adaptive relationships to
it. Such complementary series do not constitute an ‘infinite regress’:
they lead back to a historical situation in which
3
CARDINAL
. All behavior is ultimately determined by drives. This dynamic point of
view has long prevailed over the preconceptions of the old empirical
psychology and its tabula rasa; psychology has opted for Kant and
against
Hume
PERSON
.
Freud
ORG
’s contribution consists in his recognition of the preeminent role of
sexuality in this drive dynamism, and thus in his rediscovery of the
untamed root that exists prior to all cultural development.
4
CARDINAL
. All behavior makes use of psychological energy and is regulated by it.
The main point of interest here is not the energy character of drives,
but the energy character of their regulation; everything
Freud
ORG
has said about bound energy, the operation of the psychism with minimal
quantities of energy, the diminishing of the tendency toward discharge
by the heightening of thresholds, neutralization and desexualization,
and deaggressivization and sublimation, finds confirmation and parallels
in
Lewin
GPE
, and even more in the notions of power-engineering and information-engineering of cybernetics. What is peculiar to
Freud
ORG
is that he shows how this regulation operates on the borrowed energy of the drive derivatives.
5
CARDINAL
. All behavior is determined by reality. This adaptive point of view is
found not only in psychology, with its basic schema of
stimulus-response, but in biology, where reality plays the role of
environment, and even epistemology, where reality is called objectivity.
Psychoanalysis falls in with this point of view, through its successive
conceptions of reality:
first
ORDINAL
, reality was what the neurotic refuses; then, in the object stage of instincts, the correlate of the
secondary
ORDINAL
process; finally, and especially, the field of the ego’s preadaptedness. <
230><231
CARDINAL
>
a particular solution of a drive demand was
first
ORDINAL
achieved, or a particular apparatus was
first
ORDINAL
put to a certain kind of use” (
Rapaport
GPE
, p.
87
CARDINAL
).
function of its own, namely, that of reconciliation and arbitration. In the
fourth
ORDINAL
conception—Hartmann’s—the ego is preadapted, or potentially adapted, to
reality by reason of its apparatuses of primary autonomy; but there
still remains an essential duality between psychological and external
reality. In the
fifth
ORDINAL
conception, developed by
Erikson
PERSON
, man is preadapted not only to an average foreseeable environment but
to an entire evolving series of environments, which are no longer
“objective” but social.
The “adaptive” point of view has given rise to a corollary that may well constitute a distinct point of view in
American
NORP
psychoanalysis: “All behavior is socially determined”; but in any case
classical psychoanalytic theory already contains this theme, which
relates it to social psychology (theories of anaclitic object-choice, of
the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, of identification, etc.), not to mention the dissidents, the neo-Freudians of the culturalist school.
The
above comparisons show how psychoanalysis can be reintegrated into
scientific psychology with its dominant themes of adaptation,
structurization, and evolution. The contribution of psychoanalysis lies
in its stress on the entropic model and thus in its special focus on the
instinctual effects related to the primary process, whereas in academic
psychology the stress is put on sensory experience and learning.
However, these roles are in the process of being interchanged. On the
one hand, contemporary psychology of motivation is widening the scope of
academic psychology in the direction of psychoanalysis; on the other
hand, the reformulation of psychoanalysis in terms of genetic adaptation
and progressive structurization places it within the field of general
psychology. The development of psychoanalysis in the direction of an ego
psychology, starting with
Hartmann
PERSON
’s great work in
1939
DATE
(cf. n.
4
CARDINAL
), has hastened this evolution, for the ego’s functions are essentially functions of adaptation.
Thus the lines between psychoanalysis and scientific psychology are constantly being woven more tightly together.
“Operational”
Reformulations. Unfortunately, this assimilation of psychoanalysis to
observational psychology does not satisfy the psychologist and does not
respect the peculiar constitution of psychoanalysis.
What is called for, say those psychologists most conversant with
epistemology,
is not some vague relationship between psychoanalysis and psychology;
if psychoanalysis is to meet the minimal requirements of scientific
theory, it must be completely reformulated in what
Bridgman <
GPE
232><233> calls “operational language.”
<
232
CARDINAL
>
P. W. Bridgman
PERSON
, “
Operational Analysis
WORK_OF_ART
,
” Philosophy of Science, 5 (1938
WORK_OF_ART
),
114-31
CARDINAL
; “Some General Principles of
Operational Analysis
ORG
,
” Psychological Review
ORG
,
52 (1945
DATE
),
246
CARDINAL
-49.
See also
E. Frenkel-Brunswik
PERSON
, “
Meaning of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Confirmation of Psychoanalytic Theories
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Scientific Monthly
WORK_OF_ART
,
79
DATE
(
1954
DATE
),
293-300
CARDINAL
.
<
233
CARDINAL
>
B. F. Skinner
PERSON
,
Science and Human Behavior
ORG
(
New York
GPE
,
Macmillan
ORG
,
1953
DATE
);
“Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories
WORK_OF_ART
,
” Scientific Monthly (
WORK_OF_ART
1954
DATE
), reprinted in
Herbert Feigl
PERSON
and
Michael Scriven
PERSON
, eds.,
The Foundations of Science
ORG
and
the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Minnesota Studies
WORK_OF_ART
in
the Philosophy of Science
WORK_OF_ART
,
1
CARDINAL
(
Minneapolis
GPE
,
University of Minnesota Press
ORG
,
1956
DATE
),
77-87
DATE
. This volume is of great importance; in it
Herbert Feigl
PERSON
and
Rudolf Carnap
PERSON
work out a general theory of the theoretical language of the sciences
from the perspective of logical positivism. It also contains articles by
Albert Ellis
PERSON
and
Antony Flew
ORG
that will be cited further on, n.
13
CARDINAL
ff.
The only thing that actually meets the conditions of a strict op-erationalism is behaviorism; in
Skinner
PERSON
we find the rigorous conjunction of the operational and behaviorist demands.
In
the eyes of this strict operationalism, psychoanalytic theory and all
concepts that gravitate around the idea of a mental apparatus can only
be regarded as dangerous metaphors of the phlogistic kind; from the
epistemological point of view, psychoanalytic theory does not mark a
decisive advance over animism and its inventions (demons, spirits,
homunculus, personality). “
Freud
ORG
’s explanatory scheme,” writes
Skinner
PERSON
, “followed a traditional pattern of looking for a cause of human
behavior inside the organism”; this “traditional fiction of a mental
life” <234>—what
Ryle
PERSON
called “the ghost in the machine”—led
Freud
ORG
to posit something that is unobservable and cannot be manipulated; for
operationalism, however, the sole objects of inquiry are the changes of
the organism in relation to environmental variables.
Skinner
PERSON
even goes so far as to accuse
Freud
ORG
of exclusive interest in those aspects of behavior that can be regarded
as expressions of mental processes, and of having greatly narrowed the
field of observation thereby. He concludes that the
representation of the mental apparatus which
Freud
ORG
imposed upon psychoanalysis has delayed the incorporation of that discipline into the body of science proper.
Skinner
PERSON
is right, of course, in asking that all the alleged forces be
quantified if they are to be homogeneous with the forces of nature. But
he completely misses the point that an operational definition of all the
terms of psychonalysis is only an expedient by which one transcribes
into terms of behavior-ist psychology the results of a completely
different work of thought, the work of analytic interpretation. We shall
come back to this, for it will be the main point of our discussion.
The
reformulation of psychoanalysis can be attempted, therefore, only in a
modified or revised form of operationalism. The latter requires that “to
be operationally meaningful, a statement must be . . . tied to
observables at some point.” There is therefore only one irreducible
requirement: a statement or hypothesis must in some manner be
confirmable, that is, it must be related to some kind of observable.
What
is thereby aimed at is the exclusion of hypothetical constructs and
higher order abstractions, but not of lower order abstractions: the
verification of the latter may even be incomplete or indirect. This
allows for the introduction of what are called “intervening variables”
or “dispositional concepts.”
Hypothetical
ORG
constructs, such as essence, phlogiston, ether, id, libido, may be
heuristically desirable, but they have done science more harm than good.
If a reformulation of
Freudian
NORP
theory is possible—and to the limited degree that it is so—it must be done in a language entirely derived from
two
CARDINAL
observables or “facts”: perception and response. In order to set up this language of reference, it is enough to “an-
13
CARDINAL
.
Albert Ellis
PERSON
, “
An Operational Reformulation of Some of the Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Minnesota Studies
WORK_OF_ART
,
1
CARDINAL
,
131
CARDINAL
-54.
14
CARDINAL
. “Modern empiricism, in fact, seems to have
only one
CARDINAL
invariant requisite: namely, that in some final analysis, albeit most
indirectly and through a long network of intervening constructs, a
statement or hypothesis must in some manner (or in principle) be
confirmable—that is, significantly tie-able to or correctable with some
kind of observable. It thereby rules out sheer metaphysical speculation
but keeps the door widely open for all other hypotheses” (
Ellis
PERSON
, p.
135
CARDINAL
).
chor” the various constructs necessary or useful for the
explanation of human behavior in the empirical concepts of perception
and response. Thus the distinction between conscious and unconscious
perception is made by saying that the latter occurs when
one
CARDINAL
perceives but does not perceive that he perceives; learning is said to occur when
one
CARDINAL
organizes or reorganizes his perceptions and responds accordingly; the
factors of evaluating, emoting, and desiring are regarded as responses
to the predicates good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, beneficial or
harmful, which are joined to perceptions.
I will not summarize the operational reformulations that are substituted for
Freud
ORG
’s hypotheses, which are taken from the most scholastic of
Freud
ORG
’s expository works,
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
. Id, ego, superego,
Eros
LOC
, death instinct, sexual fife, anal and oral erotism, phallic phase, repression, libido, sexual libido,
Oedipus
LOC
complex, ego defenses, etc., are translated thereby into a language entirely derived from the
two
CARDINAL
initial observables.
What is completely overlooked in this
reformulation is that none of the above are “observed,” even indirectly,
as responses to stimuli; prior to the possibility of being
“reformulated,” they were all “interpreted” in the analytic
situation—that is, in a situation of language.
In connection with the enterprise of reformulation,
Madison
PERSON
’s important work on
Freud’s Concept of Repression and Defense
ORG
should be mentioned. We previously consulted this book in order to give order to the various senses of the
Freudian
NORP
concept of repression. But we bracketed the author’s precise intent, which was to submit this concept to the test of
Carnap
GPE
and
Nagel
ORG
’s epistemological requirements.
Madison
PERSON
begins by presenting univocal and coherent definitions of all the theoretical terms: the relationship be-
16
CARDINAL
. Ibid., pp.
140-50
CARDINAL
.
17
CARDINAL
. It is interesting to note that among the major
Freudian
NORP
concepts there are
two
CARDINAL
groups that are deliberately not rephrased: (a) the concept of the
psyche, of mental life, of mental qualities; (b) the concept of mental
energy and energy cathexes; these are outmoded constructs of
the nineteenth century
DATE
and are “redundant” with respect to the “behavioral intervening variables” (ibid., p.
151
CARDINAL
). As I see them, however, they are
two
CARDINAL
ontic concepts that govern the
two
CARDINAL
universes of discourse, the interpretative and the explanatory, which psychoanalysis combines in its mixed discourse.
18
CARDINAL
. For a brief summary of this work, see above, p.
138
CARDINAL
, n.
58
CARDINAL
.
tween defense and repression, the distinction between
successful and unsuccessful defenses, the subdistinction between
repressive and nonrepressive defenses, the relationship between primal
repression and repression proper (we too followed this path in our
analysis of the concept of repression). His main effort consists in
establishing a correlation between this theoretical language and an
observational language to which the former would be related by means of
correspondence rules and coordinating or operational definitions. The
conflict between instincts and anticathexis, of which repression and
defense are the manifestations, would thus correspond to the
unobservable physical concept of “atomic vibrations in solids” or “the
speed of random molecular motion in liquids or gases,” of which
temperature is the manifestation. On the plane of observational
language, symptoms, “distorted” and “remote” expression (dreams,
fantasies, jokes, etc.), various inhibitions of feeling and behavior,
and resistance in therapy would be comparable to the subjective and
objective “indicators” of temperature; finally, the specific techniques
for quantifying these indicators would have their counterpart in the
quantifiable aspects of resistance behavior (periods of silence in free
association, changes in the wording of a dream on
second
ORDINAL
telling).
Madison
PERSON
holds that the various manifestations of repression lend themselves to
translation into observational language just as easily as the
manifestations of temperature do, on condition that
one
CARDINAL
correctly subdivides the forms of resistance adopted as ‘indicators” of
repression (repression resistance, transference resistance, resistance
due to secondary gain from illness, resistance of the unconscious,
resistance from a sense of guilt).
The point on which
Madison
PERSON
’s work differs from the other attempts at reformulation is that his is
truly located on the plane of the analytic work because of his choice of
the indicators of repression: resistance, various defensive processes
(amnesia, conversion, isolation, etc.), inhibition of affects and
behavior, degrees of distortion or remoteness of the derivatives from
the unconscious. For all these indicators, correctly subdivided,
Madison
PERSON
proposes appropriate quantitative procedures. He concludes that
“repression is measurable in principle, if not presently in fact (due to
lack of the neces-
sary techniques)”; <
235
CARDINAL
> the only precaution to be taken is not to leave the therapeutic
situation, for an experimental situation can never artificially produce
something equivalent to the repression of archaic motivations or of
motivations closely finked to them by association. But
Madison
PERSON
admits that certain parts of the theory of repression can be neither
observed nor measured: he cites infantile repression, castration
traumas, and expressions of impulses in dreams; these processes are
assumptions and are not observational; an example is
Freud
ORG
’s equating little
Hans’
NORP
fear of being bitten by horses with the fear of castration: “In so far as analysts only infer the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex on such a symbolic basis, it is not statable in observational
terms, and, consequently, not measurable even in principle.” <
236
CARDINAL
> And further on: “Castration trauma is not observable if it is
always inferred on a symbolic or other indirect basis that depends in
turn upon further theoretical assumptions involved in
Freud
ORG
’s various translation rules.” <
237
CARDINAL
> By translation rules the author means symbolism and, in general, all the mechanisms of the dream-work. This limit that
Madison
PERSON
recognizes brings us back, in fact, to the problem of interpretation. Interpretation intervenes not only in cases where
one
CARDINAL
can neither observe nor measure; it covers the whole field of
investigation, only a part of which can be translated into observational
language. For example, the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is so central to
Freudian
NORP
theory that one can hardly regard it as an unobservable and
unmeasurable segment of the theory of repression without raising the
issue of what
Madison
PERSON
finally has to call “
Freud
ORG
’s dogmatism about sex.” <
238
CARDINAL
>
Madison
PERSON
believes the only way he can save an important part of
Freud
ORG
’s system is to distinguish real sex, subject to observation, from sex merely statable in the framework of
Freud
ORG
’s translation rules and not subject to an observational language. But
is it not evident that this distinction between observed sexuality and
interpreted sexuality is the ruination of
Freudian
NORP
theory? Though
Madison
PERSON
’s enterprise is most interest-
<
235
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
189
CARDINAL
.
<
236
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
190
CARDINAL
.
<
237
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
192
CARDINAL
.
<
238
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
191
CARDINAL
.
ing, and though his reading of
Freud
ORG
and his partial translation into observational language are extremely
serious, his book underscores the inability of a psychology of
positivist inspiration to furnish an equivalent of the relations of
signifier to signified that place psychoanalysis among the hermeneutic
sciences.
PSYCHOANALYSIS IS NOT AN
OBSERVATIONAL SCIENCE
PRODUCT
Let us take up in reverse order the stages of this epistemological case against psychoanalysis.
First
ORDINAL
, the critique on the part of the operationalists and their requirement
of reformulation offer a good basis with which to begin.
Second
ORDINAL
, having discovered why psychoanalysis cannot satisfy their demand, we
shall then be able to understand why the attempts from within the
psychoanalytic movement itself to compromise with behaviorism involve a
subtle betrayal of the peculiar genius of psychoanalysis. Finally, we
shall be led back to the most radical critique, the critique from the
logic of the sciences. We shall admit what it insists upon:
psychoanalysis is not an observational science. It will remain to turn
this admission into a counterattack.
Confrontation with Ope
rationalism. I do not dispute the legitimacy of reformulating
psychoanalysis in operational terms; it is inevitable and desirable that
psychoanalysis be confronted with psychology and the other sciences of
man and that the attempt be made to validate or invalidate its results
by those of the other sciences. However, it must be realized that this
reformulation is only a reformulation, that is, a
second
ORDINAL
operation with respect to the experience on the basis of which the
Freudian
NORP
concepts have arisen. Reformulation can only deal with results that are
dead, detached from the analytic experience, with definitions isolated
from one another, cut off from their origin in interpretation, and
extracted from academic presentations where they had already fallen to
the rank of mere magical phrases.
If
one
CARDINAL
fails to recognize the peculiar origin of these concepts as compared with those of behavioral psychology, there will be no
possibility
later on of saving psychoanalysis as a distinct branch of an overall
psychology of behavior. Inevitably, step by step,
one
CARDINAL
will have to agree with the most radical of the operationalists,
regarding psychoanalysis as a retarded form of observational theory and
its hypotheses as metaphors of the phlogistic sort. The difference comes
at the beginning or never: psychology is an observational science
dealing with the facts of behavior; psychoanalysis is an exegetical
science dealing with the relationships of meaning between substitute
objcts and the primordial (and lost) instinctual objects. The
two
CARDINAL
disciplines diverge from the very beginning, at the level of the initial notion of fact and of inference from facts.
It
is noteworthy that those who have come closest to recognizing the
peculiar character of psychoanalytic language and its true level of
validity are the
Anglo
NORP
-Saxon philosophers concerned with the analysis of language. <
239
CARDINAL
>
<
239
CARDINAL
> This discussion about the “logical status” of psychoanalysis began in the journal
Analysis
NORP
and centered mainly on the concepts of motive and cause:
Stephen Toulmin
PERSON
, “
The Logical Status of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Analysis
NORP
,
9
DATE
, No.
2
CARDINAL
(
1948
DATE
); reprinted in
Philosophy
GPE
and
Analysis
NORP
,
Margaret Macdonald
PERSON
, ed. (
New York
GPE
,
Philosophical Library
ORG
,
1954
DATE
), pp.
132
CARDINAL
-39.
Antony Flew
PERSON
,
“Psychoanalytic Explanation
ORG
,”
Analysis
NORP
,
10
DATE
, No.
1
CARDINAL
(
1949
DATE
); reprinted in
Phil
PERSON
, and An., pp.
139
CARDINAL
-48.
Richard Peters
PERSON
, “
Cure, Cause and Motive
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Analysis, 10
WORK_OF_ART
, No.
5
CARDINAL
(
1950
DATE
); in
Phil
PERSON
, and An., pp.
148
CARDINAL
-54. To these may be added
Flew
ORG
, “Motives and the Unconscious,” Minnesota Studies,
1
CARDINAL
(
1956
DATE
),
155
CARDINAL
-73.
One
CARDINAL
of them,
Toulmin
PERSON
, starts from the very anomaly of psychoanalytic language. The
statements of the psychoanalyst, he remarks, are not to be classed with
those that “explain” human conduct in terms of the “stated reason” (I do
this because . . . ) (Proposition Ei), or in terms of the “reported
reason” (He does this, he says, because . . . ) (
Proposition E2
LAW
), or in terms of the “causal explanation” (Because he was given an injection of cocaine) (
Proposition
PERSON
E3). E, cannot be mistaken, nor can it be verified by evidence;
E2
ORG
can be mistaken, but verified only by an Ej proposition; E3 can be
mistaken and verified by factual observations. The analytic explanation
is another form of statement,
E4
ORG
, equally distant from the statements
Els E2
PRODUCT
, and E3; in other words, psychoanalytic propositions differ as much from causal explanation
as they do from stated or reported motives. <
240
CARDINAL
> At the end of an analytic cure the statement E,t has become for the patient a plausible stated motive; for a
third
ORDINAL
party, who accepts it as a report, it has become a plausible reported
motive; for the analyst, as long as it has not been reintegrated into
the patient’s psychological field, it is merely a plausible causal
history. This way of approaching the epistemological status of
psychoanalytic propositions assumes that an explanation through motives
is irreducible to an explanation through causes, that a motive and a
cause are completely different.
<
240
CARDINAL
> With much subtlety and precision,
Toulmin
PERSON
shows that one can focus in upon this
fourth
ORDINAL
type of proposition, E„ by means of
three
CARDINAL
mixed types of propositions (Eu, E,,, Em). E« is closest to the “stated
reason” type (e.g. “I found myself wishing that I was alone with her”);
E24
CARDINAL
is closest to the “reported reason” type (e.g. “He behaved for the
moment as though he hated the sight of her”); E« is closest to the
“causal explanation” type (e.g. “He behaves like that because his father
used to beat him violently as a child”). None of these propositions is a
psychoanalytic
one
CARDINAL
, but all
three
CARDINAL
focus in on the nucleus: “The kernel of
Freud
ORG
’s discovery is the introduction of a technique in which the
psychotherapist begins by studying the motives for, rather than the
causes of neurotic behavior” (
Toulmin
PERSON
, in
Philosophy
GPE
and
Analysis
NORP
, p.
138
CARDINAL
).
I agree with this analysis: the statements of psychoanalysis
are located neither within the causal discourse of the natural sciences
nor within the motive discourse of phenomenology. Since it deals with a
psychical reality, psychoanalysis speaks not of causes but of motives;
but because the topographic field does not coincide with any conscious
process of awareness, its explanations resemble causal explanations,
without, however, being identically the same, for then psychoanalysis
would reify all its notions and mystify interpretation itself. It is
possible to speak of stated or reported motivation, provided that this
motivation is “displaced” into a field analogous to that of physical
reality. That is what the
Freudian
NORP
topography does. But if one does not take this mixed constitution of
psychoanalytic statements as the epistemological basis, he is reduced to
one
CARDINAL
of the following
three
CARDINAL
alternatives discussed by the protagonists of the Philosophy and
Analysis
NORP
controversy.
One
CARDINAL
alternative, proposed by
Antony Flew
ORG
, is to point out a contradiction between
Freudian
NORP
practice and
Freudian
NORP
theory: the former appeals to motives (e.g. those of obsessional acts), inten-
tions (e.g. of unsuccessful acts), meanings (of symptoms, dreams, etc.), whereas
Freudian
NORP
theory treats those same phenomena as “psychical antecedents” to be discovered in some unknown land as
Columbus
GPE
discovered
America
GPE
; this “real cause” of real facts can only lead to a “gratuitous
multiplication of dubious entities” which compete with the sole facts
open to observation and verification, the facts of physiology.
A
second
ORDINAL
alternative is to try to simplify analytic discourse by assigning it entirely to the realm of motives and not of causes.
Freud
ORG
’s contribution, then, would consist in having extended the notions of motive, desire, and intention to
two
CARDINAL
new spheres, the sphere of the nonknown by the subject and the sphere
of the nonvoluntary; but this extension would not change the basically
psychological or mental, i.e. intentional, character of the stream of
motivation. If such is the case, the word “unconscious” should remain
adjectival, the substantive unconscious being merely a shorthand way of
talking about unconscious motives. Through an abuse the logician cannot
condone, the adjective became the name for a region of the mind, for a
real entity producing real effects. To the contrary, one must preserve
the strong sense of the word “intention,” where intention is defined as
aiming at a goal, with the possibility, at least in principle, of the
intention’s being raised to the plane of language; because of this
intentional factor,
Freud
ORG
’s notions are logically irreducible to physicalistic terms.
Freud
ORG
’s originality consists in maintaining that the strange phenomena which
had previously been left to physiology are explainable in terms of
intentional ideas. The relationship between motivation and language
means that in principle it is possible to give a verbal account of such
phenomena; this is what distinguishes a rational agent— however
irrational—from nonrational creatures. The object of analytic therapy is
to extend the patient’s area of rationality, to replace impulsive
conduct by controlled conduct.
25
CARDINAL
.
Flew
ORG
, “Psychoanalytic Explanation,” in
Phil
PERSON
, and An. In concluding his article,
Flew
PERSON
writes: “My
two
CARDINAL
theses have been,
first
ORDINAL
, that psychoanalytic explanations or at any rate classical
Freudian
NORP
ones in the
first
ORDINAL
instance are ‘motive’ and not ‘
causal’
PERSON
explanations; and,
second
ORDINAL
, that these
two
CARDINAL
sorts of explanation are so radically different that they are not rivals at all” (p.
148
CARDINAL
). In fact, Flew softens this radical difference in his
Foreword
GPE
of
1954
DATE
(p.
139
CARDINAL
).
If this is so, psychoanalysis is more closely related to the
historical disciplines that seek to understand the reasons behind human
actions than to the psychology of behavior. <
241
CARDINAL
>
<
241
CARDINAL
> In his
second
ORDINAL
article, “Motives and the
Unconscious
ORG
,” Flew stresses the irreducibly psychological character of such terms
as motive, purpose, desire, wish, want, intention; he sets the notion of
meaning apart, remarking, “The importance of this notion has not
previously been noted either here or in the analysis controversy. It
would repay special examination: for what is involved seems to range
through a spectrum of cases shading from, at one extreme, mere
relevance, through the general possibility of motivational
interpretation, to the other extreme where the claim is that the
performances, dreams, are elements in a full-blown language” (
Minnesota Studies
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
).
Nothing is closer to my position than this article by
Antony Flew
ORG
. My criticism, however, is that he overlooks the specific character of analytic discourse: <
242
CARDINAL
> if there is no possible translation of causal language into motive language and vice versa, how does
one
CARDINAL
account for the mistake of their being combined? It surely seems that
the combination, in psychoanlaysis, of a procedure of detection (not to
say a detective method), of a technique aimed at producing behavioral
changes, and of theoretical propositions, must exclude this type of
radical clarification. <243><244>
<
242
CARDINAL
>
Flew
GPE
prefaces his article “Motives and the Unconscious” with a sentence from
Kris
PERSON
: “There is, for instance, a lack of trained clarifiers, who might
properly coordinate the various propositions with each other or try to
eliminate the inequalities of language in psychoanalysis” (ibid.,
1
CARDINAL
,
155
CARDINAL
).
<
243
CARDINAL
>
Peters
PERSON
, “
Cure, Cause and Motive
WORK_OF_ART
,” in Philosophy and
Analysis
PERSON
, pp.
148-50
MONEY
.
<
244
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., pp.
151
CARDINAL
-54. Cf.
G. Ryle
PERSON
,
The Concept of Mind, Ch
WORK_OF_ART
.
4
CARDINAL
.
The
third
ORDINAL
alternative is an attempt to reduce analytic discourse to empirical propositions. This is the position
Peters
PERSON
takes in the Philosophy and
Analysis
NORP
discussion. The difference between motive and cause is set aside as
inessential and treated as a mere difference of degree or level of
generality. If motive is defined as a relation of the type// . . . then
(in certain kinds of situations a given group of persons will respond in
certain typical ways), and if cause is defined as a relation of the
type this . . . because (the glass broke because it was dropped), the
difference between motive and cause is only one of degree; it reduces to
the distinction between general laws and initial conditions, between
theoretical explanation and his-
torical explanation (
Popper
PERSON
), between systematic explanation and historico-geographical explanation (
Lewin
PERSON
). Psychoanalysis, by reason of its complex structure, contains both
kinds of propositions: general propositions, when for example it assigns
a character trait (thrift) to an early libidinal disposition (that of
the anal stage); and also historical propositions, when it operates
“detectively.”
My position in this epistemological controversy is divided. On the one hand, I hold with
Toulmin
PERSON
and
Flew
GPE
that the reduction of motives to the type of explanation inaugurated by the
Aristotelian
NORP
formal cause and illustrated in modern epistemology by the notion of
functional dependence has nothing to do with motive in the sense of
“reason for.” The distinction between motive in the sense of “reason
for” and cause in the sense of a relation between observable facts in no
way concerns the degree of generality of propositions. It is the
distinction
Brentano
PERSON
, Dilthey, and
Husserl
PERSON
had in mind when they sharply distinguished between understanding of
the psychical or the historical, and explanation of nature; in this
sense motives are on the side of the historical, understood as a region
of being distinct from the region of nature and capable of being
considered according to the generality or singularity of its temporal
sequences. On the other hand, the distinction between motive and cause
does not resolve the epistemological problem posed by
Freudian
NORP
discourse: such discourse is governed by a unique type of being, which I
call the semantics of desire; it is a mixed discourse that falls
outside the motive-cause alternative. From the discussion it is evident
that analytic discourse falls partly within the field of motive
concepts; that is enough to make the split between psychoanalysis and
the observational sciences operative from the beginning. But the sense
of this initial difference is missed if one does not carry the
difference through to the level of the psychoanalytic “field,” that is,
to the level of analytic experience in and through which the difference
is constituted.
Confrontation with
Internal Reformulations
ORG
. Why is it, now, that the reformulations proposed by cer-
30
DATE
.
Toulmin
PERSON
,
Postscript
PERSON
(
1954
DATE
), in
Philosophy
GPE
and
Analysis
PERSON
, pp.
155-56
MONEY
.
tain analysts in order to meet the requirements of the theory
of science do not satisfy us any more than they satisfy the
operation-alists? The reason, I think, is because they betray the very
essence of analytic experience.
The psychologist speaks of
environmental variables. How are they operative within analytic theory?
For the analyst, these are not facts as known by an outside observer.
What is important to the analyst are the dimensions of the environment
as “believed” by the subject; what is pertinent to him is not the fact,
but the meaning the fact has assumed in the subject’s history. Hence it
should not be said that “early punishment of sexual behavior is an
observable fact that undoubtedly leaves behind a changed organism.” <
245
CARDINAL
> The object of the analyst’s study is the meaning for the subject of
the same events the psychologist regards as an observer and sets up as
environmental variables.
<
245
CARDINAL
>
Skinner
PERSON
,
“Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories
WORK_OF_ART
,” in
Minnesota Studies
PERSON
,
1
CARDINAL
,
81
DATE
.
For the analyst, therefore, behavior is not a dependent
variable observable from without, but is rather the expression of the
changes of meaning of the subject’s history, as they are revealed in the
analytical situation.
One
CARDINAL
may still speak, of course, of “changes in probability of action”: in this respect the patient treated by
Freud
ORG
may also be treated in terms of behavioral psychology; but that is not
how the behavioral facts are pertinent to analysis. They do not function
as observables, but as signifiers [signifiants] for the history of
desire. <
246
CARDINAL
> This signification is precisely what
Skinner
PERSON
casts into
and with getting confirmation from the other forms of
scientific psychology. The question is, however, whether psychoanalysis
is a science of “psychological observation.” The fact that observations
are made “in a clinical setting” (p.
25
CARDINAL
), that “the psychological object” is studied “in a real-life
situation,” makes no essential difference; nor even that psychoanalysis
thereby discovers “human motivation, human needs and conflicts” (p.
26
CARDINAL
); more important is the fact that in
Freud
ORG
’s “case histories” observation and theoretical elaboration go hand in hand and cannot be separated from each other (p.
27
CARDINAL
).
Hartmann
PERSON
comes very close to giving the essential reason for this when he notes
that clinical work is guided by “signs”: “A considerable part of
psychoanalytic work can be described as the use of signs ... In this
sense
one
CARDINAL
speaks of the psychoanalytic method as a method of interpretation” (p.
28
CARDINAL
).
One
CARDINAL
may ask, then, whether an investigation of the notions of sign, signal,
expressive sign, symbol, and so on, would not break through the
epistemological framework taken from the experimental sciences of
nature.
the outer darkness, into the general catch-all of theories about mental life and of prescientific metaphors. <
247
CARDINAL
> However, this meaning of a history does not concern a less advanced
stage along the one and only road of behaviorism: strictly speaking,
there are no “facts” in psychoanalysis, for the analyst does not
observe, he interprets.
<
247
CARDINAL
> This signifying function escapes the requirement, formulated by
Skinner
PERSON
, of treating behavior as a datum and “probability of response” as the
principal quantifiable property of behavior, and of stating learning and
other processes in terms of “changes of probability” (
Minnesota Studies
PERSON
,
2
CARDINAL
,
84
CARDINAL
). This function is also what prevents
one
CARDINAL
from representing the act of self-observation “within the framework of psychical science” (p.
85
CARDINAL
).
Such is, in my opinion, the analyst’s sole reply to the
behaviorist. If he accepts the methodology already established upon the
axioms of behaviorism, if he begins to formulate his research in terms
of “probability of response,” he is condemned either to be written off
as nonscientific, <
248
CARDINAL
> or to go begging for a partial rehabilitation
of cathexes, he says, includes quasi-quantitative propositions in the form of inequalities (p.
128
CARDINAL
) concerning mobile, bound, or neutralized energy. As for “dimensional
quantification,” this will be possible only when we have clarified how
processes turn into structures and have understood the process of
structure formation in general: “This clarification appears to be the
prerequisite for dimensional quantification in psychoanalysis in
particular, and perhaps even in psychology at large” (p.
132
CARDINAL
). But progress in this direction presupposes what is in question, namely, that one can and should submit
Freudian
NORP
propositions to a verification that is experimental in nature.
through what
Skinner
PERSON
calls “the simple expedient of an operational definition of terms.” The
line of defense extends through the outposts and the issue is decided
on this basic question: What is pertinent in psychoanalysis? If
one
CARDINAL
answers: Human reality as formulated in operational terms of
“observable behavior,” the condemnation inevitably follows.
<249><250><251> If one does not recognize the
specificity of the questions of meaning and double meaning, and if one
does not relate the question of double meaning to the problem of the
method of interpretation, through which this question comes to light,
then the “psychical reality” psychoanalysis speaks of will always be
one
CARDINAL
“cause” too many—a redundancy by comparison with what the behaviorist
quite competently describes as behavior; ultimately, it will be only a
“ritual form of mental alchemy,” according to
Scriven
PERSON
’s harsh phrase. <
252
CARDINAL
> This specificity is what we must now bring into the open, by
focusing on the models used in the attempt to liken psychoanalysis to an
experimental science.
<
249
CARDINAL
> That is why the rejoinders of
Michael Scriven
PERSON
are weak (
“A Study of Radical Behaviorism
WORK_OF_ART
,” in
Minnesota
GPE
Studies,
1
CARDINAL
,
105
CARDINAL
,
111
CARDINAL
,
115
CARDINAL
): it matters little that behaviorism does not conform to its own
standards either, that psychoanalysis also has an empirical content,
that propositions about “mental states” have a practical utility. In the
end,
Scriven
ORG
links the destiny of psychoanalysis to those ordinary language terms
that live on in the scientific language of psychology. In a
second
ORDINAL
article (
“Psychoanalytic Theory and Evidence
ORG
,” in
Hook
GPE
, ed.,
Psychoanalysis
FAC
,
Scientific Method
PERSON
and Philosophy, pp.
226-51
CARDINAL
),
Scriven
ORG
is, moreover, much more severe and skeptical about the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis.
<
250
CARDINAL
>
Scriven
PERSON
, in
Minnesota
GPE
Studies,
1
CARDINAL
,
128
CARDINAL
.
See Hartmann
PERSON
, in
Psychoanalysis
GPE
,
Scientific Method
PERSON
and Philosophy, pp.
18-19
DATE
,
24-25
CARDINAL
; from the stand-
point of empiricism, “theory” is justified by its heuristic or synthetic char-
acter,
or by its ability to interrelate this branch of psychology with
medicine, child psychology, anthropology, and the other human sciences.
This
attempt misunderstands the essential point: namely, that analytic
experience unfolds in the field of speech and that, within
this
field, what comes to light is another language, dissociated from common
language, and which presents itself to be deciphered through its
meaningful effects—symptoms, dreams, various formations, etc. Not to
recognize this specific feature leads
one
CARDINAL
to eliminate as an anomaly the interrelationship of hermeneutics and energetics in analytic theory.
One
CARDINAL
may indeed discover in psychoanalysis what
Rapaport
GPE
calls the empirical, gestalt, and organismic points of view, but at the
cost of a translation that alters the proper meaning of analytic
concepts. I will take as a test case the notion of “overdetermination”;
translated into the language of behaviorism and causality, this means
that every behavior can be described at one and the same time as an id
behavior, an ego behavior, etc. That is how a behavior is “multiply
determined.” The question of double meaning has been
37
DATE
.
J. Lacan
PERSON
, “Fonction et champ
de la
PERSON
parole et du langage en psy-chanalyse,”
Rapport du Congres de Rome, 1953, in La Psychanalyse, 1, 81—166
WORK_OF_ART
. My criticism of the behaviorist “reformulations” of psychoanalysis is very close to the one that could be drawn from
Lacan
GPE
’s article. We diverge, however, when I go on to criticize a conception
that eliminates energy concepts in favor of linguistics. The number of
French
NORP
writings concerned with the epistemology of
Freudian
NORP
theory is still rather small.
Cf
PERSON
.
D.
NORP
Lagache
ORG
,
L’Unite de la
ORG
psychologie (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1949
DATE
); “Definition et aspects de la psychanalyse,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
14
CARDINAL
,
384—423
CARDINAL
; “Fascination de la conscience par le moi,”
La Psychanalyse, 3 (1957), 3347
WORK_OF_ART
.
Lacan
PERSON
, “Propos sur la causalite psychique,” Evolution psychiatrique,
1947
DATE
, fasc.
1
CARDINAL
; “L’lnstance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis
Freud
PERSON
,”
La Psychanalyse, 3 (1957)
WORK_OF_ART
,
47-81
DATE
.
M. Gressot
PERSON
, “
Psychanalyse
NORP
et connaissance,”
La Psychanalyse, 2 (1956), 9-150
WORK_OF_ART
.
S. Nacht
PERSON
,
De la
ORG
pratique a la theorie psychanalytique (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
PERSON
,
1950
DATE
).
A. Green
PERSON
, “L’lnconscient freudien et la psychanalyse frangaise contemporaine,
” Les Temps modernes, 18 (1962)
WORK_OF_ART
,
365-79
CARDINAL
.
W. Huber
PERSON
,
H. Piron
PERSON
,
A. Vergote
PERSON
,
La Psychanalyse
PERSON
, science
de I’homme
PERSON
(
Brussels
GPE
,
Dessart
GPE
,
1964
DATE
), Parts I and
IV
ORG
.
38
CARDINAL
. “Every behavior has conscious, unconscious, ego, id, superego,
reality, etc., components. In other words, all behavior is multiply
determined (overdetermination). Since behavior is always multifaceted
(and even the apparent absence of certain facets of it requires
explanation), the conception of multiple determination (or
overdetermination) may be regarded as a purely formal consequence of
this method of conceptualization. . . . Overdetermination, to my mind,
implies precisely such a lack of independence and sufficiency of causes
and is inseparably connected with the multiple levels of analysis
necessitated by this state of affairs” (
Rapaport
GPE
, in
Koch
PERSON
, ed., Psychology,
3
CARDINAL
,
83-84
DATE
). Interpreted in these terms of complex causality, overdetermination
loses its specificity; is it enough to write that “Academic
covertly eliminated and translated into that of multiple causal determinations.
DATE
Thus the correlation between psychoanalytic “models” and psychological “points of view,” which stems from the adoption of the
three
CARDINAL
“fundamental points of view” of scientific psychology, involves a fundamental amputation of the question of meaning.
What
is the significance of the topographic point of view, apart from the
search for a “place” of meaning that is off-center with respect to the
apparent meaning? The problem posed by wish-fulfillment (
Wunscherfullung
ORG
) is illustrative here, for the whole theory of the primary process is
built upon its basis. An essential factor in this fulfillment is that
fantasies have a relationship of substitution with respect to the lost
objects of desire; but they would not be derivatives, nor would those
derivatives be remote or distorted, if they did not
first
ORDINAL
of all have a relationship of meaning to something that presents itself
as lost. Hence dreams, symptoms, delusions, and illusions pertain to a
semantics and a rhetoric, that is to say, to a function of meaning and
double meaning that is accounted for neither by the models nor by the
points of view enumerated above. To speak of an extension of the
economic point of view to cognitive phenomena (
Rapaport
GPE
) <253><254> is to treat the problem of the relations of
meaning in analytic interpretation by way of preteri-tion; it is mainly
due to the absence of the object that this problem of meaning arises at
every step, whether we are dealing with the absent drive object for
which the hallucinatory idea is substituted or with affect discharges in
the primary process. As for the
secondary
ORDINAL
process, the
Jacksonian
NORP
model neatly accounts for the facts of structural articulation,
automatization, control through anticathexis; but it does not account
for the fact that mastery over the absent object and even the
discrimination between its presence and its absence manifest themselves
in the very birth of language, inasmuch
psychologies did not
develop such a concept, probably because their methods of investigation
tend to exclude rather than to reveal multiple determination”? (p.
84
CARDINAL
).
Hartmann
PERSON
’s article (in
Hook
GPE
, ed.,
Psychoanalysis
FAC
, pp.
22
DATE
,
43
CARDINAL
) moves in the same direction.
<
254
CARDINAL
> In his sketch of the combined model,
Rapaport
GPE
repeatedly touches on this function of absence. Even on the level of
the primary model the absence of the drive object is essential to the
production of the hallucinatory idea or affect discharge (
Rapaport
GPE
, pp.
71-73
CARDINAL
).
as/ language distinguishes and interrelates presence and
absence. Hence, psychoanalysis does not use absence in the same way that
scientific psychology, since
Hunter
PERSON
and
Kohler
GPE
, uses detour and delay; for psychoanalysis, absence is not a secondary
aspect of behavior, but the very place in which psychoanalysis dwells.
The
reason for this is that psychoanalysis is itself a work of speech with
the patient, which scientific psychology decidedly is not; it is in a
field of speech that the patient’s “story” is told; hence the proper
object of psychoanalysis is the effects of meaning— symptoms, delusions,
dreams, illusions—which empirical psychology can only consider as
segments of behavior. For the analyst, behavior is a segment of meaning.
That is why the lost object and the substitute object are the constant
theme of psychoanalysis. Be-haviorist psychology can thematize the
absence of the object only as an aspect of the “independent variable”:
something is objectively lacking on the side of the stimuli. For the
analyst, this is not a segment in a chain of observed variables, but a
fragment of the symbolic world appearing within the closed field of
speech that analysis qua “talking cure” is. That is why the absent
object, the lost object, the substitute object are misunderstood by any
reformulation of the metapsychology that does not take its start from
what occurs in the analytic dialogue.
The list of the other
models and their correlations with the points of view familiar to
academic psychology is the occasion of a similar misunderstanding.
In
Freud
ORG
, the genetic point of view, even in its most scientific or
pseudoscientific formulations, never loses the specificity that it
receives from the interpretation of fantasies. Of course, it is correct
to say that “all behavior is part of a historical series”; it is correct
to speak in this way in order to render analytic language homogeneous
with the language of the genetic sciences. However, it must not be
forgotten that in analysis, the real history is merely a clue to the
figurative history through which the patient arrives at
selfunderstanding; for the analyst, the important thing is this
figurative history.
As for the “crucial determinants of behavior” which
Freud
ORG
Id-
40
DATE
. “Here the psychological absence of the object plays the same role as its real absence does in the primary model” (ibid., p.
74
CARDINAL
).
calizes in the unconscious, psychoanalysis never encounters
them except as instinctual representatives—ideas or affects—hence as
signifiers deciphered in their more or less distorted derivatives. If
one
CARDINAL
eliminates the signifying dimension from these crucial determinants,
one
CARDINAL
will never understand how the pleasure principle can interfere with the
reality principle. Their confrontation occurs on the level of fantasy;
in deploying its derivatives in the regions of reality, the pleasure
principle plays the role of the
first
ORDINAL
kind of knowledge in
Spinoza
GPE
, the role of “false consciousness.” Falsification and illusion are
possible because from the start the question of pleasure is the question
of truth and nontruth.
That is why, indeed, the topographic point of view yielded to the structural point of view, as
Rapaport
GPE
points out. But how are we to account for this shift, unless the
structural conflicts—between id, ego, and superego—are set within such
meaning-bearers as prohibitions, taboos, the “father complex,” which are
first
ORDINAL
of all “things heard,” “words”? Ever since
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, censorship is nothing else than an erasure of meaning, a rejection
into the region of the unconscious of what is forbidden in the official
text of consciousness.
The role of signifying also specifies the
“dynamic point of view” peculiar to psychoanalysis. It is impossible to
overemphasize the distinction, made in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, between need and wish (Wunsch); this is the same distinction that
the “Papers on Metapsychology”
LAW
drew between instincts and instinctual representatives. Although
instincts are the ultimate origin of behavior, psychoanalysis is not
concerned with these ultimates as such, but with the way they enter into
the meaningful but distorted history that comes to be told in the
analytic situation.
Hence, all the energy exchanges under the
heading of the “economic point of view,” all the work of cathecting and
decathecting, operate at the level of the instinctual representatives
and are accessible to analysis only in the distortion of meaning.
The Interpreta-
41
EVENT
. In speaking of the “unnoticeable” in psychoanalysis,
Rapaport
GPE
states: “While other psychologies treat the unnoticeable in
nonpsychological terms (brain fields, neural connections, etc.),
psychoanalysis consistently treats it in the psychological terms of
motivations, affects, thoughts, etc.” (ibid., p.
89
CARDINAL
).
tion of
Dreams
LOC
is the sure guide here: its field is what it calls the
Traumentstellung
GPE
, i.e. the transposition or distortion that manifests itself in the texture of dreams, insofar as they are a type of
Wunsch
GPE
-erfiillung, of wish-fulfillment. The distortion is the
Active
ORG
fulfillment. It is in the area of meaning that the distortion does its
“work,” in the form of displacement, condensation, pictorial
representation. As soon as the economics is separated from its
rhetorical manifestations, the metapsychology no longer systematizes
what occurs in the analytic dialogue; it engenders a fanciful
demonology, if not an absurd hydraulics.
The major difference is
found at the level of the adaptive point of view. The reality principle
of psychoanalysis is radically distinct from the homologous concepts of
stimuli or environment, for the reality in question is the truth of a
personal history within a concrete situation.
Reality
ORG
is not, as in psychology, the order of stimuli as known by the
experimentalist, but the true meaning the patient is to reach through
the obscure maze of fantasies; reality takes on meaning in a conversion
of meaning of fantasies. This relation to fantasies, as it presents
itself to be understood in the closed field of analytic speech,
constitutes the specificity of the analytic concept of reality.
Reality
ORG
always has to be interpreted through the intentionally [la visee] of
the instinctual object, as that which is both revealed and hidden by
this instinctual intending;
one
CARDINAL
has only to recall the epistemological application
Freud
ORG
made of narcissism in
1917
DATE
, when he exposed narcissism as the principal resistance to truth. That
is why reality-testing, the characteristic feature of the secondary
process, does not completely coincide with what psychology calls
adaptation. The secondary process has to be set within the framework of
the analytic situation; in this context, reality-testing is correlative
to the
Durcharbeiten
PERSON
, the “working through,” the hard work aimed at true meaning, which has
no equivalent except in the struggle for self-recognition that
constitutes the tragedy of
Oedipus
LOC
, as
Freud
ORG
himself tells us.
42
DATE
. “The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of
revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—a process
that can be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis—that Oedipus himself
is the murderer of
Lai'us
GPE
, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta” (
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
268
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
261
CARDINAL
-62).
It will be said that the reality principle finds a more solid basis in
present-day
DATE
ego psychology. But we must always keep reflecting on the implications of
Freud
ORG
’s formula: “The ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.”
This reference to the abandoned object, that is, to the work of
mourning, brings absence into the very makeup of the ego. Reality, hard
reality, is the correlate of this internalized absence. It is impossible
to separate the ego’s coherence and structural autonomy from the work
of mourning without also abandoning the peculiar field of speech in
which psychoanalysis operates.
Finally, it seems elementary to
recall that the “psychosocial point of view,” which has been
distinguished from the adaptive point of view, is not a distinct point
of view in contrast to the topographic and economic point of view. The
reason is, of course, that it is in the dual relationship of speech that
all is told. The field of analysis is intersubjective both regarding
the analytic situation itself and regarding the past dramas recounted in
that situation; this is the reason, moreover, why the drama to be
untangled can be transposed into the dual relationship of analysis
through the process of transference. The possibility of transference
resides in the intersubjective texture of desire and of the desires
deciphered within that situation. No doubt this reference to the other
person is also present in desire as distinct from need, i.e. in wishes,
and even in the psychical as distinct from the biological, i.e. in
instinctual representatives. It is because wishes are a demand on
another person, a speaking to another, an allocution, that they can
enter into a “psychosocial” field where there are refusals,
prohibitions, taboos—that is, frustrated demands. The transition to the
symbolic occurs at this crossroads, where desires are demands but
unrecognized as such. The entire Oedipus drama is lived and enacted
within the triangle of demand, refusal, and wounded desire; its language
is a lived rather than a formulated language, but at the same time it
is a short meaningful [signifie] drama in which arise the main
signifiers [signifiants] of existence. It may be that analysis
mythicizes the latter by naming them phallus, father, mother, death;
nevertheless these are precisely the structuring myths that
psychoanalysis, apart from any problematic of “adaptation,” has the task
of articulating. What confronts us
in this reasoned mythology
is the problem of access to true discourse, which is something quite
different from the adaptation that some appeal to in their haste to
overcome the scandal of psychoanalysis and to render analysis socially
acceptable. For who knows where a single true discourse might lead with
respect to the established order, that is to say, with respect to the
idealized discourse of the established disorder? The question of
adaptation is a question which existing society asks on the basis of its
reified ideals, on the basis of a false relationship between the
idealized profession of its beliefs and the actual reality of its
practical dealings. This question psychoanalysis is determined to
bracket.
In this regard, the stand taken by orthodox
psychoanalysts against culturalism is perfectly sound. To abandon the
problematic of instincts in favor of the current factors of social
adjustment, they forcefully argue, amounts to a strengthening of
censorship and the superego. But all the consequences of this opposition
should be spelled out. The psychoanalyst’s neutrality between social
demands and instinctual demands is well known. But why does the
psychoanalyst side neither with society nor with the infantile demands
of the patient, unless it is because his problem is not one of
adjustment, but of true discourse? And how would the autonomy of the ego
avoid taking the same turns as culturalism, if this autonomy is not
rooted in a problematic of veridical meaning?
Confrontation with Epistemology. We can now return to our starting point, the attack of the epis-temologists, such as
Ernest Nagel
PERSON
, on psychoanalysis.
It is now clear there can be no answer to this attack if
one
CARDINAL
assumes that psychoanalysis is an observational science and if one
misapprehends the peculiar nature of the analytic relation. Let us
reexamine
Nagel
ORG
’s
two
CARDINAL
points in reverse order: the question concerning the evidence of
statements from the standpoint of logical proof, and the nature of
theoretical propositions with respect to their verifiability.
If
we grant that the analytic situation as such is irreducible to a
description of observables, the question of the validity of
psychoanalytic assertions must be reexamined in a context distinct from a
naturalistic
science of facts. Analytic experience bears a much greater resemblance
to historical understanding than to natural explanation. Take for
example the requirement put forward by epistemology of submitting a
standardized set of clinical data to the check of a number of
independent investigators. This requirement presupposes that a “case” is
something other than a history, that it is a sequence of facts capable
of being observed by many observers. Of course, no art of interpreting
would be possible if there were no similarities between cases and if it
were impossible to discern types among these similarities. The question
is whether these types are not closer, from the epistemological point of
view, to the types of
Max Weber
PERSON
, which impart to historical understanding the character of
intelligibility without which history would not be a science. Such types
are the intellectual instruments of an understanding focused upon
singularity. Their function is irreducible to laws in an observational
science, although it is comparable to them in its own order. The reason
history may be called a science is that the system of types leads to
understanding in history just as regularities lead to understanding in
the natural sciences. However, the problematic of a historical science
does not coincide with that of a natural science. The validity of the
interpretations made in psychoanalysis is subject to the same kind of
questions as the validity of a historical or exe-getical interpretation.
The same questions must be put to
Freud
ORG
that are put to Dilthey, Weber, and
Bultmann
PERSON
, not those posed to a physicist or a biologist.
It is perfectly
legitimate, therefore, to require the analyst to compare his percentage
of improvements with the ratios obtained by different methods, or even
with the ratio of spontaneous improvement. But it should be realized
that
one
CARDINAL
is at the same time requiring that a “historical type” be transposed into a “natural species”; in doing this,
one
CARDINAL
forgets that a type is constituted on the basis of a “case history” and
by means of an interpretation that in each instance arises in an
original analytic situation. Again, psychoanalysis cannot sidestep, any
more than exegesis, the question of the validity of its interpretations;
nor even that of a certain sort of prediction (what is the probability,
for example, that a patient be accepted for therapy, or that he can
then be effectively treated?). Comparisons must surely enter into the
analyst’s field of consideration; but it is
precisely as a problem of historical science, and not of natural science, that analysis encounters and poses the problem.
These
remarks about the validation of interpretation enable us to reexamine
in new terms the prior question of theory in psychoanalysis. It is
completely misleading to raise the question in the context of a factual
or observational science. It is surely true that a theory must in
general satisfy certain rules of deductibility, which are independent of
the mode of verification, as well as certain transformation rules
through which the theory may enter some definite field of verification.
However, it is
one
CARDINAL
thing to be capable of empirical verification, and another thing to
render possible a historical interpretation. The concepts of analysis
are to be judged according to their status as conditions of the
possibility of analytic experience, insofar as the latter operates in
the field of speech. Thus, analytic theory is not to be compared with
the theory of genes or gases, but with a theory of historical
motivation. What differentiates it from other types of historical
motivation is the fact that it limits its investigation to the semantics
of desire. In this sense the theory determines, i.e. both opens and
delimits, the psychoanalytic point of view on man; by this I mean that
the function of psychoanalytic theory is to place the work of
interpretation within the region of desire. In this sense, it grounds
and at the same time limits all the particular concepts appearing in
this field.
One
CARDINAL
may, if he so wishes, speak of “deduction,” but in a “transcendental”
and not in a “formal” sense; deduction is concerned here with what Kant
calls the quaestio juris; the concepts of analytic theory are the
notions that must be elaborated so that one may order and systematize
analytic experience; I will call them the conditions of possibility of a
semantics of desire. It is in this sense that they can and should be
criticized, perfected, or even rejected, but not as theoretical concepts
of an observational science.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD
PRODUCT
The preceding discussion inclines us to look to
Husserlian
NORP
phenomenology for the epistemological
support a logic of the
observational sciences was unable to give us. This new critique no
longer concerns the results of analytic experience, but rather its
conditions of possibility, the constitution of the “psychoanalytic
field.” What we are seeking to deduce, in the sense just spoken of, are
those concepts without which analytic experience would be unthinkable.
Thus it is not a matter of reformulating the theory, that is, of
translating it into another system of reference, but of approaching the
fundamental concepts of analytic experience through another experience
that is deliberately philosophical and reflective. We are going to
confront
Freud
ORG
’s concepts with the resources of
Husserl
GPE
’s phenomenology. No reflective philosophy has come as close to the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious as the phenomenology of
Husserl
PERSON
and certain of his followers, especially
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
and
De Waelhens
PERSON
. It is well to mention at the very start that this attempt is also
bound to fail. But this failure does not have the same pattern as the
preceding one. It is not a question of a mistake or a misunderstanding,
but rather of a true approximation, one that comes very close to the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious but misses it in the end, affording only an approximate
understanding of it. In becoming aware of the gap separating the
unconscious according to phenomenology from the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious, we will grasp, by a method of approximation and difference, the specificity of the
Freudian
NORP
concepts. If reflection cannot of itself come to the understanding of
its archeology, it needs another discourse to speak that archeology.
1
CARDINAL
. What turns phenomenology directly toward psychoanalysis, prior to any
elaboration of a particular theme, is the philosophic act with which
phenomenology begins, which
Husserl
PERSON
calls the “reduction.” Phenomenology begins with a methodological
displacement that already affords some understanding of that
displacement or off-centering of meaning with respect to consciousness.
The
reduction, indeed, has some relation to the dispossession of immediate
consciousness as origin and place of meaning; the phenomenological
bracketing or suspension is not concerned simply with the “self-evidence
” (Selbstverstdndlichkeit) of the appearance of things
WORK_OF_ART
, which suddenly cease to appear as a brute presence, to be there, to be
at hand, with a fixed meaning that one has only to find.
To the
extent that consciousness thinks it knows the being-there of the world,
it also thinks it knows itself. Furthermore, to the so-called knowledge
on the part of immediate consciousness there belongs a pseudo-knowledge
on the part of the unconscious, a knowledge that
Freud
ORG
points to at the beginning of the paper “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
” and which we ordinarily connect with the experience of sleep or the
state of unconsciousness, with the disappearance and reappearance of
memories, or with the sudden violence of the passions. This immediate
consciousness is deposed along with the natural attitude. Thus
phenomenology begins by a humiliation or wounding of the knowledge
belonging to immediate consciousness. Further, the arduous
self-knowledge that phenomenology goes on to articulate clearly shows
that the
first
ORDINAL
truth is also the last truth known; though the
Cogito
PERSON
is the starting point, there is no end to reaching the starting point;
you do not start from it, you proceed to it; the whole of phenomenology
is a movement toward the starting point. By thus dissociating the true
beginning from the real beginning or natural attitude, phenomenology
reveals the self-misunderstanding inherent in immediate consciousness.
This misunderstanding is alluded to in a statement
Husserl
PERSON
makes in
the Cartesian Meditations
ORG
, §
9
CARDINAL
: “Adequacy and apodicticity of evidence need not go hand in hand.” Of
course, a nucleus of primordial experience is presupposed by
phenomenology; that is what makes it a reflective discipline. Without
the presupposition of such a nucleus—“the ego’s living self-presence”
(die lebendige Selbst-gegenwart)—there is no phenomenology; that too is
why phenomenology is not psychoanalysis. But beyond this nucleus extends
a horizon of the “properly nonexperienced” (eigentlich nicht erjahren),
a horizon of the “necessarily co-intended” (notwendig mitgemeint). This
implicit factor is what allows one to apply to the
Cogito
PERSON
itself the critique of evidence previously applied to things: <
255
CARDINAL
>
This presumption, therefore, which is co-implicit in
apodictic evidence, requires a critique that would determine
apodictically the range of the possibilities of its fulfillment. How far
can the transcendental ego be deceived about itself [sich iiber sich
selbst tduschen]? And how far do those components extend that are
absolutely indubitable in spite of such possible deception?”
Edmund Husserl
PERSON
,
Cartesian Meditations
ORG
, tr. Dorion
Cairns
GPE
(The
Hague
GPE
,
Nijhoff
PERSON
,
1960
DATE
), §
9
CARDINAL
, p.
22
CARDINAL
(with changes).
The
Cogito
PERSON
, too, is a presumed certitude; it too can be deceived about itself; and
no one knows to what extent. The resolute certitude of the / am
involves the unresolved question of the possible extent of
self-deception. Into this fissure, into this noncoincidence between the
certitude of the I am and the possibility of self-deception, a certain
problematic of the unconscious can be introduced. But it is a
problematic with which we are acquainted. The
first
ORDINAL
unconsciousness or unawareness [inconscience] phenomenology reveals has
to do with the implicit, the co-intended: for the model of this
implicit—or better, this “co-implicit”—one must look to a phenomenology
of perception.
2
CARDINAL
. A
second
ORDINAL
step toward the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious is represented by the notion of intentionality, a notion
both commonplace and unfathomable. Intentionality concerns our
meditation on the unconscious inasmuch as consciousness is
first
ORDINAL
of all an intending of the other, and not self-presence or self-possession. Engrossed in the other, it does not at
first
ORDINAL
know itself intending. The unconsciousness that attaches to this
bursting forth from self is that of the unreflected; since Ideen I, the
Cogito
PERSON
appears as “life”: <
256
CARDINAL
> the
Cogito
PERSON
is operative [opere] prior to being uttered, unreflected prior to being reflected upon. What is more, in the period of the
Krisis
PERSON
, intentionality in act (die fungierende
Intentionalitdt
ORG
) is broader than thematic intentionality, which knows its object and knows itself in knowing that object; the
first
ORDINAL
can never be equaled by the
second
ORDINAL
; a meaning in act always precedes the reflective movement and can never
be overtaken by it. The impossibility of total reflection, hence
<
256
CARDINAL
> “In the natural mode of living-in-the-world [im natiirlichen
Dahin
GPE
-leben], I live continually in this fundamental form of all ‘actual’
living, whether I can or cannot assert [aussagen] the cogito, and
whether I am or am not ‘reflectively’ directed toward the ego and the
cogitare. If I am so directed, then a new cogito has come to life, which
for its part is unreflected upon and so is not an object for me.
” Husserl
PERSON
, Ideen I, §
28
CARDINAL
(tr.
W. R. Boyce
PERSON
Gibson, Ideas [
New York
GPE
,
Collier Books
ORG
,
1962
DATE
], pp.
93—94
CARDINAL
[with changes]).
the impossibility of the
Hegelian
NORP
absolute knowledge, hence the finitude of reflection, as
Fink
PERSON
and
De Waelhens
PERSON
have deduced it, are written into this primacy of the unreflected over
the reflected, of the operative over the uttered, of the actual over the
thematic. This unawareness [inscience] proper to the unreflected marks a
new step toward the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious; it means that the co-implicit or co-intended cannot
completely attain to the transparency of consciousness precisely because
of the texture of the act of consciousness, i.e. because of the
invincible unawareness of self that characterizes intentionality in act.
The corollaries of this
second
ORDINAL
theorem are as follows.
First
ORDINAL
, it is possible to give a direct definition of the psychism—as the mere
intending of something, as meaning—without appealing to
selfconsciousness. But this, as
one
CARDINAL
writer has said, contains the whole of
Freud
ORG
’s discovery: “the psychical is defined as meaning, and this meaning is dynamic and historical.”
Husserl
PERSON
and
Freud
ORG
are seen to be the heirs of
Brentano
ORG
, who had both of them as students.
Second
ORDINAL
, it is possible to dissociate the actual lived relation from its
refraction in representation. In a philosophy of immediate consciousness
the subject is
first
ORDINAL
of all a knowing subject, that is to say, ultimately, a look directed
to a spectacle; in such a philosophy, the spectacle is at the same time
the mirage of self in the mirror of things; the primacy of
self-consciousness and the primacy of representation are interconnected;
by becoming representation the relation to the world becomes
self-knowing. Thus phenomenology should widen the opening made by
Husserl
PERSON
himself in the venerable tradition of the knowing subject (although
Husserl
PERSON
personally maintained the primacy of objectivizing acts over the grasp
of affective, practical, and axiological predicates of things in the
world).
45
CARDINAL
.
E. Fink
PERSON
,
Appendix XXI
PERSON
to §
46
CARDINAL
of the Krisis (Husserliana,
6
CARDINAL
[The
Hague
GPE
,
Nijhoff
PERSON
,
1954
DATE
],
473
CARDINAL
-75). On the difference between the “thematic” and the “operative” [operatoire] and on “finite philosophic activity,” cf.
Fink
ORG
, “Les concepts operatoires dans la phenomenologie
de Husserl
PERSON
,” in
Husserl
GPE
,
Cahiers de Royaumont
ORG
(
Paris
GPE
,
Editions de Minuit
ORG
,
1959
DATE
), pp. 214—41. Also,
A. de Waelhens
PERSON
, “
Reflexions
ORG
sur une problematique husserlienne de 1’inconscient:
Husserl
PERSON
et
Hegel
PERSON
,” in
Edmund Husserl
PERSON
,
1859—1959
DATE
(The
Hague
GPE
,
Nijhoff
PERSON
,
1959
DATE
), pp.
221
CARDINAL
-38.
46
CARDINAL
.
A. Vergote
PERSON
, “
L’Interet philosophique
WORK_OF_ART
de la psychanalyse freudienne,”
Archives de philosophic
WORK_OF_ART
(
Jan.-Feb
DATE
.
1958
DATE
), p.
38
CARDINAL
.
The possibility that man is primarily “concern for things,”
“appeti-tion,” desire and quest for satisfaction, is opened up anew, as
soon as the psychical is no longer defined as consciousness, or the
actual lived relation as representation.
A further consequence of
the primacy of the intentional over the reflective: the dynamics of
operative meaning (meaning in act or in operation) is more fundamental
than the statics of uttered or represented meaning. Here again
Husserl
PERSON
opens the path for his Frenchspeaking successors by introducing, in the
fourth
ORDINAL
Cartesian
NORP
meditation, the problem of the “passive genesis” of meaning.
Husserl
PERSON
approaches this entirely new problem by asking a prior question: How are a diversity of experiences “compossible” in
one
CARDINAL
and the same ego? The “essential laws of compossibility” govern all the
problems of genesis in the sphere of the ego. Now the form of
compossibility, for an ego, is time—not the time of the world, but the
temporality by which a series of cogitationes forms a sequence, a
succession. In phenomenology, then, genesis refers to the operation of
linking together the various dimensions of the temporal flux, past,
present, and future: “The ego constitutes itself for itself, so to
speak, in the unity of a history.”
It is here that the idea of “passive genesis” enters in, which in a new way “points toward” the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious. In the active genesis, “the ego operates by productively
constituting through specific acts of the ego.” This praxis is operative
in logical reason, in the sense that logical objects too are “products”
(Erzeugnisse) of operations such as counting, predicating, inferring,
etc.; thus it is possible to regard the in-itself [l’en-soi] of these
objects as the correlate [le vis-a-vis] of a “habitual” operation; the
in-itself is an “attainment,” abidingly possessed, but which may also be
“re-produced” in a new operation. However,
Husserl
PERSON
remarks, “every construction on the part of activity necessarily
presupposes, at the lowest level, a passivity that receives the object
as
pregiven
CARDINAL
.” In other words, when we trace back an active production we run into
(stossen wir) an antecedent constitution through passive genesis. What
is the passive genesis?
Husserl
PERSON
hardly talks about it except at the level of per-
47
CARDINAL
. Meditations, §
37
DATE
.
48
CARDINAL
. §
38
CARDINAL
.
ception; the passive synthesis is the thing itself as
pregiven, as a residue from the perceptual learning experiences of
infancy; such experiences make up the ego’s “being affected,” and the
thing itself is found in our perceptual field as a thing with which we
are already well acquainted. But the trace of history is not so covered
over that reflection cannot explicate the layers of meaning and “thus
find intentional references leading back to an [antecedent] ‘history.’ ”
These references make it possible to go back to the “
first
ORDINAL
founding,” the Urstiftung.
A confrontation with the
Freudian
NORP
exegesis of symptoms is possible on this basis. There is always a “goal-form” (
Zielform
PERSON
) which points back, by means of its genesis, to its own founding:
everything known points to an “original becoming acquainted.” Thus there
is a clear affinity between
Husserlian
NORP
explication and
Freudian
NORP
exegesis by reason of their regressive orientation. Further, by
positing “association as the universal principle of passive genesis,
” Husserl
PERSON
discloses a mode of constitution irreducible to that of logical
objects, not only a nonlogical constitution, but a constitution subject
to other, albeit essential, laws. Although association is commonly
defined in terms of the old psychology,
Husserl
PERSON
recognizes that the old concept is “a naturalistic distortion of the
corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.” He thus provides for its
generalization beyond the perceptual sphere. In this sense, association
has to do precisely with our existence qua irrational (irrational) brute
fact (Faktum): “Nor should it be overlooked here that [brute] fact,
with its irrationality, is itself a structural concept within the system
of the concrete apriori.”
Is not such an explication of a
meaningful contingency what psychoanalysis proceeds to carry out? Is it
not sufficient to extend to desire and its objects this explication of
layers of meaning, this investigation of an “original founding”? Is not
the history of the libidinal object, through the various stages of the
libido, just such an explication by means of successive retroreferences?
The linking together of signifiers in what we have called the semantics
of desire is the concrete realization of that which
Husserl
PERSON
glimpsed under
the
49
PRODUCT
. Ibid.
50
CARDINAL
. §
39
CARDINAL
.
old title of association, but of whose intentional
significance he was perfectly aware; in short, phenomenology talks about
the passive genesis, the meaning that comes about apart from me, but
psychoanalysis concretely shows it.
The final corollary to the theorem of intentionality concerns the phenomenological notion of
one
CARDINAL
’s own body, or, in
the language of the later
DATE
writings of
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
, the notion of flesh. When asked how it is possible for a meaning to
exist without being conscious, the phenomenologist replies: its mode of
being is that of the body, which is neither ego nor thing of the world.
The phenomenologist is not saying that the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious is the body; he is simply saying that the mode of being of
the body, neither representation in me nor thing outside of me, is the
ontic model for any conceivable unconscious. This status as model stems
not from the vital determination of the body, but from the ambiguity of
its mode of being. A meaning that exists is a meaning caught up within a
body, a meaningful behavior.
If this is so, it is possible to
gradually reexamine, in terms of meaningful behavior, what was said
about the genesis of meaning, the psychical character of meaning, and
the notion of intentionality itself. Every enacted meaning is a meaning
caught up within the body; every praxis involved in meaning is a
signifying or intention made flesh, if it is true that the body is “that
which makes us be as existing outside of ourselves.”
By this thesis, phenomenology moves toward the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious; moreover, once granted this interpretation of the body as
incarnate meaning, it is possible to account for the human meaning of
sexuality—at least of sexuality in act. Sex in act consists in
51
DATE
. Vergote, p.
47
CARDINAL
.
52
CARDINAL
.
De Waelhens
PERSON
, Existence et signification (
Louvain, Nauwelaerts
ORG
,
1958
DATE
), “
Reflexions
ORG
sur les rapports de la phenomenologie et de la psychanalyse,” pp.
191
CARDINAL
-
211
CARDINAL
: “The body is that side of ourself, that dimension originally turned
toward the outside, which makes us be as though outside of ourselves”
(p.
200
CARDINAL
). “This radical closeness between things and us is developed and formed
within a medium, a mediating element which is neither ego nor thing (or
which is both at once): the body. Whether psychoanalysis explicitly
formulates the body or not, this same thesis is at the basis of all
psychoanalysis and phenomenology must surely come to grips with it” (p.
192
CARDINAL
).
making us exist as body, with no distance between us and
ourself, in an experience of completeness exactly contrary to the
incompleteness of perception and spoken communication. It is an
experience of completeness in the sense that the body, becoming totally
manifest, suppresses all reference to actions in the world. Not only
does phenomenology move here in the direction of psychoanalysis, but it
offers it a satisfactory schema to account for the relationship between
sexuality, as a particular mode, and human existence, regarded as an
undivided totality. The relationship is not of part to whole: sexuality
is not an isolated function alongside many others; it affects all
behavior. Nor is it a relationship of cause to effect, for a meaning
cannot be the cause of a meaning; between sexual behavior and total
behavior there can only be an identity of style, or, to put it another
way, a relationship of homology. Sexuality is a particular manner of
living, a total engagement toward reality; this particular mode is
precisely the manner in which
two
CARDINAL
partners try to make themselves exist as body, and nothing but body.
3
CARDINAL
. The reduction is the methodological displacement that defines the
phenomenological attitude; intentionality is the theme of phenomenology.
This theme has in turn many implications, of which we have selected
only those which have special relevance to psychoanalysis.
Two
CARDINAL
further propositions deserve separate treatment; they are far more than
simple corollaries of the phenomenological notion of meaning. The
first
ORDINAL
concerns the dialectical aspects of language; the
second
ORDINAL
concerns intersubjectivity.
At
first
ORDINAL
view the phenomenology of language seems to be merely an extension of
the phenomenology of perception; here too, the important thing is to
question back from the uttered meaning to meaning in operation. Man is
language; in this conviction, phenomenology agrees with
Von Humboldt
GPE
and Cassirer. But the phenomenological problem of language really
begins when the act of speaking [le dire] is taken on the plane where it
establishes a meaning, where it makes a meaning clearly exist, apart
from any explicit apophan-tic, i.e. prior to statements or uttered
meanings. The problem raised
53
CARDINAL
. See De Waelhens’ admirable text on sexuality, Existence et signification, pp.
204-11
CARDINAL
.
by perception, of questioning back from representation to the
experientially lived relationship, repeats itself on the plane of
language. It must be rediscovered with
Hegel
PERSON
that language is the being-there of the mind; for phenomenology, as for
psychoanalysis, this “reality of language” is nothing other than the
meaning achieved by a behavior.
Still, the extension to language
of the analysis of perception as meaning in operation is not a mere
extrapolation; the comparison also serves to reveal features of
perception that can be made explicit only on the plane of spoken signs.
These features indirectly throw light upon the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious. I have brought them together under the heading of the dialectic of absence and presence. >
This dialectic has
at least three
CARDINAL
aspects.
First
ORDINAL
, man’s adoption of language is in general a way of making himself
absent to things by intending them with “empty” intentions, and,
correlatively, of making things present through the very emptiness of
signs.
This dialectic of presence and absence, characteristic of all signs, is specified in
two
CARDINAL
ways, depending on whether one considers speech as the act of the
speaking subject, or language as an instrument of communication
organized on a level different from consciousness and the intention of
each of the speaking subjects. A language has its own way of being
dialectical: each sign intends something of reality only by reason of
its position in the ensemble of signs; no sign signifies through a
one
CARDINAL
-to-one relation with a corresponding thing; each sign is defined by its
difference from all the others. More precisely, it is by combining
together the phonemic and the lexical differences, hence by setting into
play the double articulation of phonemes and morphemes, that we speak
the world.
In turn, the actual use of language in the speech of
speaking subjects brings out the ambiguity of all signs. In ordinary
language each sign contains an indefinite potential of meaning; a simple
glance at the dictionary reveals a sort of gradual slipping into or
endless infringement upon the semantic areas of all the other signs. To
speak is to set up a text that functions as the context for each word;
the potential of words heavily charged with meaning is thus limited and
determined by the context, although the rest of the
charge of
meaning is not thereby done away with; only part of the meaning is thus
rendered present, through occultation of the rest of the possible
meaning.
By these
three
QUANTITY
types of dialectic of presence and absence the phenomenology of
language moves in the direction of psychoanalysis and its unconscious.
First
ORDINAL
, the interplay of absence and presence characteristic of signs as such
is aptly illustrated in the genesis psychoanalysis proposes of the
spoken sign; phenomenologists have a special fondness for those pages of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
in which
Freud
ORG
sketches the genesis of signs starting from the mastery over privation in the game of fort-da. By alternately voicing the
two
CARDINAL
words, the child interrelates absence and presence in a meaningful
contrast; at the same time, he no longer undergoes absence as a fit of
panic massively substituted for a close and saturating presence.
Dominated thus by language, privation—and consequently presence as
well—is signified and transformed into intentionality; being deprived of
the mother becomes an intending of the mother. <
257
CARDINAL
>
ORG
<
257
CARDINAL
>
De Waelhens
PERSON
, “
Sur L’lnconscient et la
WORK_OF_ART
pensee philosophique,
” Journees de Bonneval sur I’inconscient (mimeograph
WORK_OF_ART
,
1960
DATE
), pp.
16-21
CARDINAL
; “
Reflexions
ORG
sur une problematique husserlienne de l’inconscient:
Husserl
PERSON
et
Hegel
PERSON
” (see n.
45
CARDINAL
), p.
232
CARDINAL
.
The fort-da example is not just an isolated case. “Mourning and
Melancholia” teaches us that beyond the lost archaic objects, it is
possible to establish a relationship to the object that is not simply a
repetition of the archaic situation. The manner in which mourning gives
up the object as lost recalls the institution of signs, which are
universally a giving up of brute presence and an intending of presence
in absence.
This recourse to language reinforces the parallel
between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The dialectic of presence and
absence, which language sets in motion, is now seen to be operative in
all forms of the implicit and the co-intended, in all human experience
and at all levels. Thus language makes it possible to generalize the
perceptual model of the unconscious. The ambiguity of “things” becomes
the model of all ambiguity of subjectivity in general and of all the
forms of intentionality.
What is more, the dialectic of presence
and absence completes the process whereby the initial false knowledge
on the part of immediate consciousness is made to waver. From now on the
question of consciousness becomes an obscure as that of the
unconscious, to paraphrase a celebrated text of Plato on being and
nonbeing. Thus phenomenology turns out to be just as radical as
psychoanalysis in contesting the illusion of immediate self-knowledge.
Every mode of being conscious is for subjectivity a mode of being
unconscious, just as every mode of appearing is correlative to a
nonappearing or even a disappearing, both signified together,
co-signified, in the presumption of the thing itself. Language reveals
this co-signifying of the implicit as absence, and it does so more
clearly than a phenomenology of mute perception. Thus language brings
out the full significance of the perceptual model of the unconscious for
phenomenology.
4
CARDINAL
. The theorem concerning language as a dialectic of presence and absence
has to be complemented by a theory of intersubjectivity: All our
relationships with the world have an intersubjective dimension.
The
fact that the perceived thing is perceptible by others brings the
reference to others into the very makeup of things qua presumed things;
what points to others is precisely the horizon of perceptibility, the
invisible other side of the visible. Between the positing of others as
perceiving and the assumption of the invisible other side of things
there is a reciprocal relation. Every meaning ultimately has
intersubjective dimensions; every “objectivity” is intersubjective,
insofar as the implicit is what another can make explicit.
This
first
ORDINAL
recourse to intersubjectivity seems unrelated to psychoanalysis;
nevertheless, the radical connection phenomenology discerns between
intersubjectivity and the unconsciousness peculiar to the implicit is
sufficient warning of the danger of defining an unconscious that is not
originally implicated in intersubjective relations; this warning
concerns psychoanalysis to the extent that the
first
ORDINAL
topography, the one on which its epistemology was structured, remains basically solipsistic. On the other hand, the
second
ORDINAL
topography fundamentally satisfies this requirement of phenomenology,
since
its agencies and roles are definitely set up in the intersubjec-tive
field. Above all, however, the fundamental and absolutely primal role of
intersubjectivity takes on its full meaning when it is extended to
areas other than representation, according to the suggestions of our
second
ORDINAL
theorem. If the meaning phenomenology speaks of is more “operated” than
uttered, more lived than represented, that texture is seen most clearly
in the semantics of desire; it seems that desire, as a mode of being in
close contact with beings, is human desire only if the intending is not
merely a desire of the other but a desire of other desires, that is, a
demand. Here all the themes we have touched upon come together: meaning,
body, language, intersubjectivity.
The intersubjective structure of desire is the profound truth of the
Freudian
NORP
libido theory; even in the period of
the “Project” and Chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung
EVENT
,
Freud
ORG
never described instincts outside of an intersubjective context; if
desire were not located within an interhuman situation, there would be
no such thing as repression, censorship, or wish-fulfillment through
fantasies; that the other and others are primarily bearers of
prohibitions is simply another way of saying that desire encounters
another desire—an opposed desire. The whole dialectic of roles within
the
second
ORDINAL
topography expresses the internalization of a relation of opposition,
constitutive of human desire; the fundamental meaning of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is that human desire is a history, that this history involves
refusal and hurt, that desire becomes educated to reality through the
specific unpleasure inflicted upon it by an opposing desire.
At this point the confrontation, reduced to
two
CARDINAL
terms
—Husserl
PERSON
and
Freud—
ORG
should be widened into a triangular relation:
Hegel
GPE
,
Husserl
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
. It has been said <
258
CARDINAL
> that
Hegel
PERSON
appears at
first
ORDINAL
to be more suited to a comparison with
Freud
ORG
: the movement to selfconsciousness through the reduplication of desire
in desire, the education of desire in the struggle for recognition, the
inauguration of that struggle in a nonegalitarian situation—all these
Hegelian
<
258
CARDINAL
>
Jean Hyppolite
PERSON
, “
Phenomenologie de Hegel
GPE
et psychanalyse,”
La Psychanalyse, 3, 17 ff
WORK_OF_ART
.,
225
CARDINAL
ff.
De Waelhens
PERSON
, “
Reflexions
ORG
sur une proble-matique husserlienne,” pp.
225
CARDINAL
ff.
themes appear to have more analogies with psychoanalytic themes than does
Husserl
PERSON
’s labored theory of perceptual intersubjectivity. There is an obvious similarity between the
Hegelian
NORP
struggle of master and slave and the Freudian Oedipus complex.
But if these remarks are true as a
first
ORDINAL
approximation, and if the comparison with
Hegel
PERSON
has an undeniable pedagogical advantage, a closer confrontation reveals a more hidden and perhaps more significant affinity.
De Waelhens
PERSON
observes that on
two
CARDINAL
basic points
Husserl
PERSON
is closer than
Hegel
PERSON
, if not to the overt
Freudian
NORP
themes, at least to the ultimate intention of analysis. After
Husserl
PERSON
, we cannot lay claim to a completion of the constituting of meaning in
an absolute discourse that would put an end to that constituting as an
ongoing process; just as meaning remains incomplete for each subject, so
too it remains incomplete for all; as
De Waelhens
PERSON
remarks, “from the point of view of analysis, absolute knowledge is
meaningless.” <259><260> Furthermore, the procedure whereby
the
Hegelian
NORP
thinker, that omniscient interpreter, moves ahead of the unfolding of
the prototypic history of the mind, is likewise excluded from analytic
experience: the analyst, closer in this respect to the maieutic
procedure of phenomenological reflection, barely keeps ahead of the
progress of the subjectivity he is helping in its enterprise of
recognition. The phenomenologist and the analyst both realize that
dialogue is endless.
<
259
CARDINAL
>
De Waelhens
PERSON
, ibid., p.
226
CARDINAL
.
<
260
CARDINAL
> In the series of articles by
De Waelhens
PERSON
there is a noticeable shift in the discussion from the problem of the unconscious to the problem of
It
is not surprising that phenomenology and pyschoanalysis should meet on
this level. As we said in the discussion of scientific psychology, it is
from the analytic situation itself, as a language relationship, that
all discussion must begin. The discourse of the unconscious becomes
meaningful only in the interlocutory discourse of analysis; everything
we said about the transition from desire to language by means of
renunciation finds its manifestation in the psychoanalytic “talking
cure”; the constitution of the subject in speech and the constitution of
desire in intersubjectivity are one and the same phenomenon; desire
enters into a meaningful history of mankind only insofar as that history
is “constituted by speech addressed to the other.” In return, it is
because desire is desire of
desire, hence demand, hence
constituted by language addressed to the other, that analytic dialogue
is possible; such dialogue simply transfers into the field of a
derealized discourse the drama of desire, insofar as it already was a
spoken drama, a demand. It is not surprising therefore that all the
problems of the constitution of desire should reappear in the analytic
relation. The relation is reciprocal: on the one hand, the
intersubjective structure of desire makes it possible to investigate
desire in the relationship of transference; conversely, the analytic
relationship is able to repeat the history of desire because what comes
to speech in the field of the derealized discourse is desire in its
original status as demand on the other.
At this point of the
approximation, the difference between phenomenology and psychoanalysis
seems to be almost nonexistent. Are they not both aiming at the same
thing, namely the constitution of the subject, qua creature of desire,
within an authentic intersubjective discourse?
When we consider our starting point in the light of our point of arrival, we understand more clearly why the
two
CARDINAL
methods are parallel. Phenomenological reduction and
Freudian
NORP
analysis are homologous in that both aim at the same thing. The
reduction is like an analysis, for it does not aim at substituting
another subject for the subject of the natural attitude; it is not taken
up with the attempt to flee “elsewhere.” Reflection is the meaning of
the unreflected, as avowed or uttered meaning; better, the subject doing
the reduction is not some subject other than the natural subject, but
the same; from being unrecognized it becomes recognized. In this respect
the reduction is the homologue of analysis, when the latter states that
“where id was, there ego shall be.” But this initial homology between
the methods is understood only at the end. Phenomenology attempts to
approach the real history of desire obliquely; starting from a
perceptual model of the unconscious, it gradually generalizes that model
to embrace all lived or embodied meanings, mean-
language, and then to that of intersubjectivity; his latest study on psychoanalysis, in
La Philosophic
PERSON
et les experiences naturelles (The
Hague
GPE
,
Nijhoff
PERSON
,
1961
DATE
), is deliberately located in the chapter on “
Others
WORK_OF_ART
” (pp.
135— 67
CARDINAL
).
One
CARDINAL
should take note of the pages concerning the role of the analyst,
conceived as the interlocutor who helps to bring about a situation of
“disengagement” or isolation with respect to the real, a derealized
situation in which repetition and remembering may occur.
ings
that are at the same time enacted in the element of language.
Psychoanalysis plunges directly into the history of desire, thanks to
that history’s partial expression in the derealized field of
transference. But both have the same aim, “the return to true
discourse.”
PSYCHOANALYSIS IS NOT PHENOMENOLOGY
And yet . . .
And
yet phenomenology is not psychoanalysis. However slight the separation,
it is not nil, and phenomenology does not bridge the gap. Phenomenology
does give an understanding of psychoanalysis, but only through
approximation and by way of diminishing differences.
Let us reexamine each of the points of our phenomenological approximation to the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious.
1
CARDINAL
. Phenomenology is a reflexive discipline; the methodological
displacement it sets into operation is the displacement of reflection
with respect to immediate consciousness. Psychoanalysis is not a
reflexive discipline; the off-centering it brings about is fundamentally
different from the “reduction” in that it is very strictly constituted
by what
Freud
ORG
calls the “analytic technique,” which he breaks down under
two
CARDINAL
headings: the procedure of investigation and the technique of treatment. The
Freudian
NORP
unconscious is rendered accessible through the psychoanalytic
technique; but this type of archeological excavation has no parallel in
phenomenology. Hence the suspicion analysis professes about the
illusions of consciousness is different from the suspension of the
natural attitude.
58
CARDINAL
.
De Waelhens
PERSON
, ibid., p.
154
CARDINAL
.
59
CARDINAL
. “‘Psychoanalyse’ und ‘
Libido Theorie,’”
EVENT
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
211
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
18
DATE
,
235
CARDINAL
: “
Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
is the name (1) of a procedure [Verfahren] for the investigation of
mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a
method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment
[Behandlungsmethode] of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of
psychological information [Einsichten] obtained along those lines, which
is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.”
60
CARDINAL
. Vergote, “
L’lnteret philosophique de la
WORK_OF_ART
psychanalyse freudienne,”
Archives de Philosophic (Jan.-Feb
WORK_OF_ART
.
1958
DATE
), pp.
28-29
CARDINAL
.
61
CARDINAL
. Vergote: “Freedom is the correlate of the arbitrariness of con-
If phenomenology is a modification of the
Cartesian
NORP
doubt about existence, psychoanalysis is a modification of the
Spinozist
NORP
critique of free will; analysis begins by denying that the apparent
arbitrariness of consciousness is anything more than the nonrecognition
of underlying motivations. Whereas phenomenology begins with an act of
“suspension,” with an epoche at the free disposition of the subject,
psychoanalysis begins with a suspension of the control of consciousness,
whereby the subject is made a slave equal to his true bondage, to use
Spinoza
GPE
’s terms. By starting from the very level of this bondage, that is, by
unreservedly delivering oneself over to the domineering flux of
underlying motivations, the true situation of consciousness is
discovered. The fiction of absence of motivation, on which consciousness
based its illusion of self-determination, is recognized as fiction; the
fullness of motivation is revealed in place of the emptiness and
arbitrariness of consciousness.
Further on we shall speak of how this attack on illusion opens up, as in
Spinoza
GPE
, a new problematic of freedom, a freedom no longer linked to the
arbitrary but to understood determination. It was important that the
difference in points of view was
first
ORDINAL
of all stated in its full force, on the very basis of the patent similarity. <261><262>
sciousness” (p.
29
CARDINAL
). And further on: “The inherent law of the problematic of freedom is to go beyond the
first
ORDINAL
and privative notion toward the recognition of a fullness which is at
the same time creative. But this latter presupposes that determination
and motivation are integrated into freedom” (p.
30
CARDINAL
).
<
262
CARDINAL
> In an important and enlightening text that we will have more to say about later, “L’lnconscient, une etude psychanalytique,
” Journees de Bonneval (
WORK_OF_ART
mimeograph,
1960
DATE
),
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
sharply distinguish between any phenomenological interpretation of
consciousness and the “process of becoming conscious” in psychoanalytic
treatment: “In the latter it is rare and even exceptional that the
disclosure of the unconscious should occur as a phenomenon that can be
located in a single moment or field of consciousness. Generally it is a
process of patient work, moving from
one
CARDINAL
particular to another, wherein the revision of perspectives is brought
about through discontinuous and isolated moments of consciousness often
far removed from one another and none of which are characterized by the
sudden reconversion of the ensemble of meanings that the term
‘unveiling’ might suggest” (p.
10
CARDINAL
). The process of becoming conscious differs from any sudden remembrance
or illumination by reason of its topographic character: it is a matter
of a reworking of the systems, aimed at incorporating into “an organized
structure of self-apprehension, which includes a
2
CARDINAL
. It cannot be denied that the perceptual model of the unconscious, in
phenomenology, points toward the analytic unconscious, so far as the
latter is not a receptacle of contents but a center of intentions, of
orientations-toward, of meaning. This signifying character is evidenced
by the various derivatives of the primary representatives and by the
relations of meaning to meaning which those derivatives have among
themselves and with their origin. That remains true; but the important
thing, for analysis, is that this meaning is separated from becoming
conscious by a barrier. This is the essential factor in the idea of
repression. The topography represents this essential factor by means of
its auxiliary schemata:
one
CARDINAL
moves from phenomenology to psychoanalysis when
one
CARDINAL
understands that the main barrier separates the unconscious and the
pre-conscious, and not the preconscious and the conscious; to replace
the formula Cs./Pcs.,
Ucs
PERSON
. by the formula
Cs
PERSON
.,
Pcs./Ucs
GPE
. is to move from the phenomenological point of view to the topographic
point of view. The unconscious of phenomenology is the preconscious of
psychoanalysis, that is to say, an unconscious that is descriptive and
not yet topographic. The meaning of the barrier is that the unconscious
is inaccessible unless an appropriate technique is used. From this point
on, all the vicissitudes of instincts will be represented by relations
of exteriority. Of all the vicissitudes, repression is the one the
topography is most anxious to picture; but repression is a real
exclusion which a phenomenology of the implicit or co-intended can never
reach. These vicissitudes are surely not foreign to the order of the
psychical, of motivation, of meaning; that is why the phenomenological
approach has not been useless; it is indeed another text that
psychoanalysis deciphers, beneath the text of consciousness.
Phenomenology shows that it is another text, but not that this text is
other. The realism of the topography expresses this
plurality of moments, an entire coherent discourse that is never wholly actualized” (ibid., p.
11
CARDINAL
). That is why we shall speak later on of becoming conscious as
Durcharbeiten
PERSON
, as working through. Phenomenology accounts only for “field phenomena”
pertaining to a perceptual model (the fringes of the implicit, the
horizon of the perceptible, the invisible other side of the visible),
that is to say, phenomena at the frontier between the preconscious and
the conscious, which
Freud
ORG
, it is true, “barely began to describe” (ibid., p.
12
CARDINAL
).
otherness of the text, at the limit of an approach that has revealed it as a text.
If we review the series of corollaries to the
second
ORDINAL
point, this understanding by way of approximation becomes more
articulated. The psychism, we said to begin with, is defined by meaning
and not necessarily by consciousness. To understand this proposition is
to approach the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious. But the separation of this meaning we have just spoken of is simply an aspect of what
Freud
ORG
called the “systemic laws.” The systems have their own legality, a fact
Freud
ORG
expresses by the list of characteristics of the unconscious we have
previously commented on: primary process, absence of negation,
timelessness, etc. This legality cannot be reconstructed
phenomenologically, but only through the familiarity provided by
analytic technique. It is not another consciousness one could grasp
through conceptual thought; it is a meaning one must “keep probing into
through practice.” a3
Again, phenomenology shows that the lived
meaning of a behavior extends beyond its representation in conscious
awareness; phenomenology thus prepares us to understand the relations of
meaning between the instinctual representatives and their derivatives.
But the remoteness and distortion that separate those derivatives from
their roots, and the division into
two
CARDINAL
types of derivatives, the ideational and the affective, require an
instrument of investigation that phenomenology cannot provide. The
notion of ideational representative is approached as meaning, intention,
aiming; phenomenology makes that quite clear. But another technique is
required in order to understand the remoteness and the division at the
basis of the distortion and substitution that make the text of
consciousness unrecognizable.
The same may be said of the gap between the passive genesis, in
Husserl
GPE
’s sense, and the dynamics of instincts which
Freud
ORG
deciphers by means of the analytic technique. Here it is a question not
only of the topographic point of view but of the economic point of
view: the notion of cathexis expresses a type of adhesion and cohesion
that no phenomenology of intentionality can possibly reconstruct. At
this point the energy metaphors replace the inadequate
63
DATE
. Vergote. “
L’lnteret philosophique de la
WORK_OF_ART
psychanalyse freudienne.”
language of intention and meaning.
Conflicts, formations of compromise, facts of distortion—none of these
can be stated in a reference system restricted to relations of meaning
to meaning, much less, as in
Politzer
GPE
, of literal meaning to intended meaning; the distortion that separates
the literal meaning from the intended meaning requires concepts such as
dream-work, displacement, condensation, which we have shown to be both
heremeneutic and energic in nature; the function of the energy metaphors
is to account for the disjunction between meaning and meaning. <
263
CARDINAL
>
<
263
CARDINAL
>
G. Politzer
PERSON
,
Critique
GPE
des fondements de la psychologie,
1
CARDINAL
.
La Psychologic
PERSON
et la psychanalyse (
Rieder
ORG
,
1928
DATE
).
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
, “
L’ln
GPE
-conscient,
” Journees de Bonneval
FAC
: “(a) the unconscious is not coextensive with the manifest as its
meaning; rather it is to be interpolated in the gaps of the manifest
text; (b) the unconscious stands in relation to the manifest, not as the
intended meaning to the literal text, but on the same level of reality.
It is what allows us to conceive a dynamic relationship between the
manifest text and that which is absent from and to be interpolated in
that text: it is a fragment of discourse that must regain its place
within discourse” (pp.
8—9
CARDINAL
). And further on: “
Freud
ORG
has need of a radical split between
two
CARDINAL
domains located on the same level of reality, for this is the only
thing that enables him to account for psychical conflict . . . the
lacunary phenomena are still posited here at the origin of the
Ucs
GPE
. hypothesis. But the Ucs. does not consist in a more comprehensive
meaning that would enable one to connect such phenomena to the rest of
the text, but is rather a
second
ORDINAL
structure in which those lacunary phenomena find their unity, independently of the rest of the text” (p.
14
CARDINAL
).
To satisfy this requirement,
Freud
ORG
developed the notion of an energy specific to each system and capable
of cathecting representations. There is no denying that the difficulties
surrounding this notion are numerous and perhaps insurmountable. The
roles assigned to this cohesive force are not easy to coordinate; in
one
CARDINAL
role, it is an energy that holds isolated elements together within the
whole of a given system; in another, it collaborates in the repression
of higher systems through the force of attraction exercised by the
previously constituted unconscious system; in a
third
ORDINAL
, it works to promote the process of becoming conscious in opposition to
the vigilance of censorship. Nor is it easy to conceive just what
relations this cathectic energy proper to each system has with the
libido, for the latter, by reason of its organic origin, is neutral with
respect to the systems and becomes localized in a given system
according to the locus of
the representations to which it
attaches itself. The most difficult notion of all is the idea of an
“energy that is transformed into meaning.”
Nothing, consequently,
is firmly settled in this area; indeed, it may be that the entire
matter must be redone, possibly with the help of energy schemata quite
different from
Freud
ORG
’s. For a critical philosophy, the essential point concerns what I call
the place of that energy discourse. Its place, it seems to me, lies at
the intersection of desire and language; we will attempt to account for
this place by the idea of an archeology of the subject. The intersection
of the “natural” and the “signifying” is the point where the
instinctual drives are “represented” by affects and ideas; consequently
the coordination of the economic language and the intentional language
is the main question of this epistemology and one that cannot be avoided
by reducing either language to the other.
We will focus on this
coordination by taking the linguistic aspects of the unconscious as our
guide. Nowhere else do phenomenology and psychoanalysis come closer to
being one; nowhere else, therefore, will the gap between the
two
CARDINAL
disciplines be more significant.
3
CARDINAL
. The unconscious is structured like a language, say
Lacan
PERSON
and his followers. Isn’t this “linguistic” conception of the
unconscious indistinguishable from the interpretation of language
presented by
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
and
De Waelhens
PERSON
? When the latter conceive of language as an instituting [instauration]
of meaning that takes place prior to any explicit judgment, are they not
saying the same thing as those who maintain the linguistic conception
of the unconscious? Actually, the latter conception makes sense only in
conjunction with the economic concepts of
Freudian
NORP
theory; instead of replacing the
Freudian
NORP
topographic and economic point of view, it paral- <
264><265
CARDINAL
>
<
264
CARDINAL
>
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
, pp.
17-18
CARDINAL
; they appeal to a gestalt interpretation of the cathectic energy of a
given system: such energy would be identical to a pragnanz of good forms
in each system (p.
19
CARDINAL
).
<
265
CARDINAL
>
Vergote
PERSON
, pp.
53-54
CARDINAL
, thus defines the proper object of analytic depth psychology: “the
meaning constituted without freedom, by the spontaneity of the
instincts. . . . For analysis, the dynamic is an energy that is
transformed into meaning. . . . The force of instincts in conflict gives
rise to a meaningful history.”
lels that point of view in every
respect. Thus the linguistic interpretation shows that the unconscious,
though separated by repression and the other mechanisms that give it
the form of a system, is nevertheless correlative to ordinary language.
The linguistic interpretation does not constitute an alternative to the
economic explanation; it simply prevents the latter from being reified
by showing that the mechanisms that come under the economics are
accessible only in their relation to hermeneutics. To say that
repression is “metaphor” is not to replace the economic hypothesis but
rather to parallel it with a linguistic interpretation and thus relate
it to the universe of meaning without reducing it to that universe.
However,
before specifying the precise relations between linguistics and the
economics, it is perhaps necessary to come to an agreement about the
word “linguistic,” which up to now we have been hesitant to use when
designating the relations of meaning between symptoms, fantasies,
dreams, ideals, and unconscious themes. The term “linguistic” may be
applied to the field of analysis on the condition that it is taken in a
wide sense; it then denotes
two
CARDINAL
distinct but interconnected aspects of the analytic situation.
First
ORDINAL
, the technique of analysis moves entirely within the element of language. Benveniste writes,
The
analyst operates with what the subject tells him, he views the subject
in the discourses that the latter makes, he examines him in his locutory
and “story-making” behavior, and through these discourses there is
slowly shaped for him another discourse that he must make explicit, that
of the complex buried within the unconscious. The analyst, therefore,
will take the discourse as a stand-in for another “language” which has
its own rules, symbols, and syntax and which refers back to underlying
structures of the psychism.
Thus, on the one hand there are
speech events, a locution, an interlocution, and on the other, through
those events, the bringing to light of “another discourse,” constituted
by the relations of substitu-
67
CARDINAL
.
Emile Benveniste
ORG
, “Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la decouverte freudienne,”
La Psychanalyse, 1, 6
WORK_OF_ART
.
tion and symbolization between the motivations belonging to
the unconscious. Now, properly speaking, are the laws of that other
discourse linguistic laws?
It is indeed difficult to make that other discourse coincide with what, since
De Saussure
PERSON
, we call language [langue] as opposed to speech [la parole], a
distinction based on the fact that language has a phonemic articulation,
a semantic articulation, and a syntax.
In the
first
ORDINAL
place, it is impossible to make the absence of logic in dreams, their ignorance of “No,” accord with a state of real language.
Freud
ORG
once tried to do this, without success, in his essay on
“The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words
WORK_OF_ART
.” It is impossible, however, to make the archaism of the processes of
distortion and pictorial representation coincide with a primitive form
of language or in general with any chronological reality whatsoever; as
Ben
PERSON
-veniste aptly states, the
Freudian
NORP
archaic “is such only in relation to that which deforms or represses it.”
Even in the favorable case of negation (
Verneinung
PERSON
), which we have previously discussed, the opposition between
affirmation and negation is not an extension of the properly libidinal
dialectic of admission and rejection, for an expressed negation can only
refer to an expressed affirmation. The prior refusal of admission, in
which repression consists, is something else: the specific function of
repression, in the case of
Verneinung
PERSON
, consists in admitting a content into consciousness intellectually while at the same time keeping it
68
CARDINAL
. It would seem that
Freud
ORG
brought the investigation to an impasse in trying to make the
regressive character of dreams, their disregard of contradiction,
coincide with a state of primitive language. In his article “liber den
Gegensinn
GPE
der Urworte” (“
The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
214
CARDINAL
-21; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
155
CARDINAL
-61), he appeals to the authority of
Karl Abel
PERSON
(
1884
DATE
) in order to confirm the regressive and archaic character of dreams by a
peculiarity of primitive languages, that of expressing antithetical
meanings by the same words.
Benveniste
NORP
pertinently notes that what a language does not distinguish by distinct
signs is not thought of as being antithetical: “each language is
peculiar and fashions the world in its own way” (p.
10
CARDINAL
). “It is surely contradictory to impute to a language the knowledge of
two
CARDINAL
notions as being contrary to one another and the expression of those
notions as being identical with one another.” Benveniste concludes:
“Everything seems to take us farther and father away from an
experiential correlation between the logic of dreams and the logic of an
actual language” (p.
11
CARDINAL
).
outside of consciousness; but this mechanism sets up a
repugnance of identifying oneself with this content, which is not a
linguistic phenomenon.
It is not without reason that
Freud
ORG
does not take language [le langage] into consideration when he treats
of the unconscious but rather restricts its role to the preconscious and
the conscious. The signifying factor [le signifiant] which he finds in
the unconscious and which he calls the “instinctual representative”
(ideational or affective) is of the order of images, as is evidenced
moreover by the regression of the dream-thoughts to the fantasy stage.
Here we must bring together several lines of thought that remain
unconnected in
Freud
ORG
. The form by which an instinct reaches the psychism is called a
“representative” (Reprasentant); this is a signifying factor, but it is
not yet linguistic. As for the “presentation” properly so-called (
Vorstellung
PERSON
), this is not, in its specific texture, of the order of language; it is
a “presentation of things,” not a “presentation of words.”
Secondly
ORDINAL
, in dream regression, the form into which the dream-thought dissolves corresponds to the mechanism which
Freud
ORG
calls regression to “pictorial representation” [figuration]. Finally,
when he treats of the derivatives substituted for one another and for
the instinctual representatives, and when he explains remoteness and
distortion, he always relates them to the order of fantasy or images,
and not of speech. In these
three
CARDINAL
different circumstances
Freud
ORG
focuses on a signifying power that is operative prior to language. The
primary process encounters the facts of language only when words are
treated in it as things: this is the case of schizophrenia and also of
dreams in their more “schizophrenic” aspects. <
266
CARDINAL
>
<
266
CARDINAL
> In the section of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
on the work of condensation, in which
Freud
ORG
interprets the dream of
Irma
GPE
’s injection, the following assertion is made: “The work of condensation
in dreams is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. It
is true in general that words are treated in dreams as though they were
concrete things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just
the same way as presentations of concrete things [DingvorstellungenY (
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
301-02
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
4
CARDINAL
,
295—96
CARDINAL
); there follow a few examples of verbal conceits. In Section VII of
“The Unconscious,” the discussion of schizophrenia (in a patient of
Tausk
ORG
’s) presents the occasion for a more complete treatment of the problem:
“In schizophrenia words are subjected to the same process as that which
makes the dream-images [
Traumbilder
ORG
] out of latent dream-
If we take the concept of linguistics in
the strict sense of the science of language phenomena embodied in a
given and therefore organized language, the symbolism of the unconscious
is not stricto sensu a linguistic phenomenon. It is a symbolism common
to various cultures regardless of their language; it presents phenomena
such as displacement and condensation which operate on the level of
images, and not that of phonemic or semantic articulation. In
Benveniste
NORP
’s terminology, the dream mechanisms will appear now as infra-, now as
supralinguistic. For my part, I will say that they manifest the blending
[confusion] of the infra- and supralinguistic; they belong to the
infralinguistic order insofar as they fall short of the level where
education brings about the distinctive rule of a language; they belong
to the supralinguistic order if one considers that dreams, according to
one of
Freud
ORG
’s own remarks, find their true
thoughts—to what we have called
the primary psychical process. They undergo condensation, and by means
of displacement transfer their cathexes to one another in their
entirety. The process may go so far that a single word, if it is
specially suitable on account of its numerous connections, takes over
the representation [
Vertretung
ORG
] of a whole train of thought” (
GW
PERSON
,
10, 29798
DATE
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
199
CARDINAL
). And
Freud
ORG
adds in a footnote: “The dream-work, too, occasionally treats words like things, and so creates very similar ‘
schizophrenic’
PRODUCT
utterances or neologisms” (ibid.). This is, then, a very particular process which assures what
Freud
ORG
calls “the predominance of what has to do with words [
Wortbeziehung
GPE
] over what has to do with things [Sach-beziehung\,” in the sense that
the similarity between words is substituted here for the resemblance
between things, whereas in the transference neuroses the resemblance
between things is predominant.
Freud
ORG
proposes the following economic explanation of the process: the
object-cathexes have been given up, and only the cathexis of the
word-presentations is retained; this implies that what had previously
been called the “presentation of the object” can be split up into the
“presentation of the word” and the “presentation of the thing”: “the
latter consists in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of
the thing, at least of remoter memory traces derived from these” (
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
300
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
201
CARDINAL
). From this
Freud
ORG
draws the important conclusion that an “unconscious presentation” is
the “presentation of the thing [Sachvorstellung] alone,” whereas a
conscious presentation comprises both that and the presentation of the
word. “The system lies. contains the thing-cathexes [Sachbesetzungen] of
the objects, the
first
ORDINAL
and true object-cathexes [Objektbesetzungen]: the system Pcs. comes
about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being
linked with the word-presentations corresponding to it” (ibid.). This
linking of the
two
CARDINAL
orders of presentation is characteristic therefore of the Pcs.; it is
an approach to the process of becoming conscious insofar as it makes the
latter “possible.”
kinship in the great unities of discourse
such as proverbs, sayings, folklore, myths. From this point of view, it
is on the level of rhetoric rather than linguistics that the comparison
should be made.
Rhetoric
GPE
, however, with its metaphors, its metonymies, its synec-dochies, its
euphemisms, its allusions, its antiphrases, its litotes, is concerned
not with phenomena of language but with procedures of subjectivity that
are manifested in discourse.
To call these mechanisms infra- or
supraiinguistic is, of course, still to refer them to language. That is
precisely what constitutes the soundness of the linguistic
interpretation. We are in the presence of phenomena structured like a
language; but the problem is to assign an appropriate meaning to the
word “like.”
It is in the interplay and blending of the infra-
and the supraiinguistic that we shall find something like the
instituting of meaning with which phenomenology is familiar.
In order to account for this instituting of meaning,
one
CARDINAL
may start from the fact that the desire or wish (Wunsch) disclosed
through interpretation is never a pure need, but is rather an appeal and
a demand, even if the appeal is presented figuratively through a
gesture; this appeal, being a sort of allocution, is like a language.
What distinguishes a wish from a need is the fact that a wish is capable
of being stated; this capability is exactly coextensive with the
celebrated Riicksicht auf
Darstellbarkeit
GPE
. Hence it is on the level of the instinctual representatives that we
must look for something like a language. The very fact that dreams are
expressed in narratives and that their elements cluster around
“switch-words” is confirmation that “the capture of instincts in the
nets of the sig-nifier” pertains to the order of language in a different
way from
70. “
Style
WORK_OF_ART
, rather than language, is where I would see a term of comparison with the properties that
Freud
ORG
has shown to be descriptive of the ‘dream language’” (
Benveniste
NORP
, p.
15
CARDINAL
).
71
CARDINAL
. In the brief analysis of “
Philippe’s Dream
WORK_OF_ART
,” proposed by
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
(“L’lnconscient, une etude psychanalytique,
” Journees de Botineval
WORK_OF_ART
,
1960
DATE
), the desire to drink is represented by a series of pictorial
equivalents of this appeal: the drinking of fountain water from cupped
hands, the arrangement of the palms of the hands in the form of a conch.
The arrangement of the hands and the phrase “Lili, I’m thirsty” are
instinctual representatives; as such “they point, within the text of the
interpretation, to the living core of the dream” (p.
28
CARDINAL
).
what is disclosed through an observation of organized
language. What analysis penetrates to is indeed something like a text.
The “regard for representability” is itself something like a language,
although this is not on the level of “word-presentation” but of
“thing-presentation.”
But what about language?
We have already noted the parallel between Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and
Jokes
PERSON
; it is based on the fact that the dream mechanisms of condensation and
displacement appear to be well-defined figures of classical rhetoric;
but we did not go beyond a general analogy. Starting from the role of
the switch-words in the unconscious text of dreams, it is possible to
develop in detail the interpretation of condensation as metaphor and
displacement as metonymy.
Let us follow, with
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
, the path of metaphor. In a language without metaphors, there would
indeed be relations of signifier to signified [rapports de signifiant a
signifie],
DATE
which may be symbolized by —; but there would be no equivocation
in the language, nor any unconscious to decipher. With metaphor,
S'
PRODUCT
a new signifier
S'
PRODUCT
replaces the signifier (this may be written—); but the former S, instead of being suppressed, drops to the rank of
the
CV
PRODUCT
•
signified (which may be written-^-); the important point is that it
u
• S'
continues on as a latent signifier. Thus one does not simply have —
•
S S'
PRODUCT
in place of —, but a more complex formula;—would be the reduced
s s
PRODUCT
72
DATE
. In
Philippe
PERSON
’s dream, the substitution of the village square [la place] where the
fountain stands, for the seashore [la plage], where the sand irritated
his feet, is of the order of metaphor; the movement whereby the unicorn
[licorne] refers to its whole legend and to an entire cycle of
signifiers functions as metonymy. Concerning metonymy: “When we speak of
the metonymic function of the unicorn, it is not because this signifier
refers to an object that would satisfy the thirst in question, but
rather because the unicorn, as metonymy, is the representative which
points to and covers over the vertiginous gap within being, or, if you
will, its ‘original castration.’ Thus metonymy, by reason of its
inexhaustible possibility of displacement, is the proper instrument to
designate and mask over the fissure in which desire is born and to which
it ceaselessly aspires to return” (ibid., p.
29
CARDINAL
).
or simplified version of that formula. For its complex form, the •
S' s
PRODUCT
authors propose the written formula— x — (Formula 1), of which
o S
C/
PRODUCT
—is in effect the simplification. But they write it out only to trans-
S'
form it algebraically into (Formula
2
CARDINAL
).
i3
J
PRODUCT
Whatever reservations one may have about these purely algebraic operations (what possible meaning can be assigned to
the S' s
PRODUCT
multiplication - which allowed
Formula 1
FAC
to be transformed
s
PRODUCT
into
Formula 2
PRODUCT
?), the final formula deserves to be taken, if not as a true formula, at
least as a useful schema for study. It serves the purpose of
stimulating reflection about the bar that separates the
two
CARDINAL
relations. The authors use the bar to express the double nature of
repression: it is a barrier that separates the systems, and a relating
that ties together the relations of signifier to signified. Because of
its double function, the bar may be said to be not only the symbol of a
linguistic phenomenon, a relating of relations consisting solely of
signifiers and signified, but also a dynamic phenomenon—the bar
expresses repression which impedes transition to a higher system.
The artifice at least enables
one
CARDINAL
to construct a diagram in which repression and metaphor exactly parallel one another.
Metaphor
NORP
is nothing other than repression, and vice versa; but it is just when
they are seen to coincide that the irreducibility of the economic to the
linguistic point of view reappears in a striking manner. What
73
CARDINAL
. The cohesive factor binding the systems together can be expressed only
in energy language. In the case of “after-repression” (Nachverdrangung)
or “repression proper,” this cohesive force is manifested by the
“attraction” exercised by a previously constituted chain, to which must
be added the withdrawal of cathexis from the higher system whereby the
connection is broken and a hypercathexis whereby a term that has been
forced out of the chain is replaced by another one. The case of “primal
repression,” which has to be reconstructed, is more difficult. Here we
are dealing with the origin of the split into systems, prior to any
“attraction” exercised by a constituted system;
Freud
ORG
expresses this by saying that anticathexis is the sole mechanism of
primal repression. It is possible to make some sort of correlation
between language and this original division into
two
CARDINAL
systems, but the correlation is as mythical as the “origin” of the Ucs., as mythical
has
been gained, then, by this reading? Everything and nothing. Everything,
for there is no economic process to which there cannot be found a
corresponding linguistic aspect; thus the energy aspect is completely
paralleled by a linguistic aspect that guarantees the correlation of the
unconscious to the conscious. Nothing, for the only thing that
guarantees the separation of the systems is the economic explanation:
withdrawal of cathexis, anticathexis, attraction on the part of the
unconscious in secondary repression or repression proper, anticathexis
in primal repression. If a fragment of discourse is to set forth an
ordered sequence of signifiers, it is necessary, in
Freud
ORG
’s words, that “the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct [be] denied entrance into the conscious”; <
267
CARDINAL
> this denial, which precisely constitutes primal repression (
Urverdran
NORP
-gung), is not a phenomenon of language.
as any “origin” (though not more so).
Freud
ORG
’s text on primal repression lends itself to such a step by stating that
the action of anticathexis results in a “fixation” of the
representative to the instinct, a process which, as we have seen, is
understood as the emergence of the instinct into psychical expression,
its accession to the order of signifier. Extending this interpretation
with the help of the diagram of metaphor, one will conceive “the
existence of certain key signifiers [signifiants-cles] which function
metaphorically and upon which has devolved, because of their particular
weight, the property of ordering the whole system of human language. It
is clear that we are alluding in particular to what
J. Lacan
PERSON
has called the father metaphor” (
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
, p.
39
CARDINAL
). In the example of
Philippe
PERSON
's dream, one can see the constitution of a
first
ORDINAL
chain of signifiers in the connection between the need of drinking and
thirst, as appeal and demand: the fixation to a representative took
place when someone clearly articulated “
Philippe
PERSON
’s always thirsty” and nicknamed him “thirsty
Philippe
PERSON
.” “We can now formulate the myth of the origin of the unconscious as
follows: the unconscious results from the capture of instinctual energy
in the nets of the signifier, inasmuch as the signifier there is
precisely aimed at covering over the fundamental gap of being which is
the unceasing source of the metonymy of desire” (ibid., p.
46
CARDINAL
).
74
CARDINAL
. “Repression,”
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
250
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
148
CARDINAL
.
The interpretation of repression as metaphor shows that the
unconscious is related to the conscious as a particular kind of
discourse to ordinary discourse; but the economic explanation is what
accounts for the separation of the
two
CARDINAL
discourses. In the
four
CARDINAL
-stage diagram of secondary repression, repression and metaphor are
strictly coextensive; but the barrier functions both as a relation
between signifying or signified factors and as a force of exclusion between dynamic systems.
The
strange and, in the proper sense of the term, nonlinguistic
characteristics of this discourse are explained, I believe, by the
irre-ducibility of the energy aspect. It is striking indeed that in the
diagram of metaphor the original signifier, replaced by the substitute
signifier and reduced to a latent signifier, is treated as a double term c
—;
the same element S has the position of both signifier and signified, a
situation for which there is no linguistic parallel. This was an attempt
to account for what
Freud
ORG
called “thing-presentation” or “regard for representability.” But can
one treat as a linguistic element an image that would be in the position
of both the signifier and the signified? What linguistic character is
left in the imago if the latter functions indifferently as signifier or
signified? How can one say of it that it refers to itself and that it
remains open to all meaning?
We can retain, then, with the
reservations just made, the statement that the unconscious is structured
like a language; but the word “like” must receive no less emphasis than
the word “language.” In short, the statement must not be divorced from
Ben
PERSON
-veniste’s remark that the
Freudian
NORP
mechanisms are both infra- and supralinguistic. The mechanisms of the
unconscious are not so much particular linguistic phenomena as they are
paralinguistic distortions of ordinary language.
For my part I
would characterize this distortion as the confusion or blending of the
infra- and the supralinguistic. On the one hand,
75
CARDINAL
. “In a sense, one can say that the signifying chain is pure meaning,
but one can just as well say that it is pure signifier, pure nonmeaning,
or open to all meanings” (
Laplanche and Leclaire
ORG
, p.
40
CARDINAL
). Is this not to admit that it is not properly a linguistic phenomenon?
The authors frankly recognize the difficulty: “A distinction should be
made, however, between the mode of functioning of the primary process in
our ‘origin
fiction’
PERSON
and in the case of the unconscious chain. In the
first
ORDINAL
case there was after all a distinction between the signifier level and the signified level, although the
two
CARDINAL
are constantly infringing upon one another; in the
second
ORDINAL
case, the possibility of ‘all meanings’ stems from an actual identity
of the signifier and the signified. Does this mean there is no
possibilty here of infringement? Not at all; but that which infringes or
is displaced is instinctual energy, pure and unspecified” (p.
41
CARDINAL
).
the dream mechanism borders on the supralinguistic when it
mobilizes stereotyped symbols parallel to those ethnology finds in the
great unities of meaning known as fables, legends, myths; a good part of
the “pictorial representation” in dreams is located on this level,
which is already beyond that of the phonemic and semantic articulations
of language.
On the other hand, displacement and condensation
belong to the infralinguistic order, in the sense that what they achieve
is less a distinct relating than a confusion of relations. One might
say that dreams arise from a short-circuiting of the infra- and the
supralinguistic. <
268><269><270
CARDINAL
> This jumbling of the infra- and the supralinguistic is perhaps the most notable language achievement of the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious.
<
268
CARDINAL
> The fragment of
Philippe
PERSON
’s dream neatly confirms this confusion. On the one hand the metonymy of
desire, sustained by the signifier licorne [unicorn], deploys itself
not on the plane of the elementary relations of the signifier and the
signified but on that of the legend. But at the same time the dream
plays upon the homophony of the G of plage [seashore] and
j’ai
PERSON
soif [I’m thirsty]; the wordplay operates through attrition and distortion on the
G
level
of the phonemic elements; the homophony -q is what gives rise to the
metonymic displacement through which the need of drinking becomes
“thirst for” under the emblem of the unicorn. The licorne represents
both its own legend (and thus assures what has been called the metonymy
of desire) and the word licorne, which, on the phonemic plane, divides
into li-corne. The unconscious text, which is to be interpolated into
the conscious text, must be supplied as a signifying chain between li
and corne. The unconscious chain is therefore a complicated patchwork
with its various signifiers of ordinary language
(Lili-plage-sable-peau-pied-corne), whereas condensation condenses the
sequence to its
two
CARDINAL
end terms, li-corne. Thus the licorne image is both the mythic
potential of the fabled animal and the wordplay of li-corne. This is
what we call the jumbling of the infra- and the supralinguistic.
In
conclusion, the linguistic interpretation has the merit of raising all
the phenomena of the primary process and of repression to the rank of
language; the very fact that the analytic cure itself is language
attests to the mixture of the quasi language of the unconscious and
ordinary language. But the distortion—the Entstellung —which turns that
other discourse into a quasi language is not itself achieved by
language. The “infra” or the “supra” with respect to language is what
separates psychoanalysis from phenomenology.
This confusion of language is also what raises the urgent and difficult question of an archeology of the subject.
4
CARDINAL
. The theme of intersubjectivity is undoubtedly where phenomenology and
psychoanalysis come closest to being identified with each other, but
also where they are seen to be most radically distinct. The narrowest
difference is also the most decisive one.
If the analytic
relationship may be regarded as a privileged example of intersubjective
relations, and if that relationship takes the specific form of
transference, it is because the analytic dialogue brings to light, in a
special context of disengagement, isolation, and derealization, the
demands in which desire ultimately consists.
This analysis has
enabled us to relate in principle all the vicissitudes of the analytic
situation to the intersubjective constitution of desire; I have nothing
to retract from it. Yet it is precisely here that psychoanalysis is most
radically distinct from anything phenomenology can understand and
produce with its sole resources of reflection. The difference is summed
up in a word: psychoanalysis is an arduous technique, learned by
diligent exercise and practice.
One
CARDINAL
cannot overestimate the amazing audacity of this discovery, namely of treating the intersubjective relationship as technique.
How is the word used here?
One
CARDINAL
of
Freud
ORG
’s texts, which we have already cited, binds together inseparably method
of investigation, technique of treatment, and elaboration of a body of
theories.
77
DATE
. See above, n.
59
CARDINAL
:
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
221
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
235
CARDINAL
. In other texts
Freud
ORG
takes the psychoanalytic method as including both the method of
investigation and the technique of treatment: “The particular
psychotherapeutic procedure which
Freud
ORG
practices and describes as ‘
psychoanalysis’
GPE
is an outgrowth of what was known as the ‘
cathartic’
PERSON
method and was discussed by him in collaboration with
Josef Breuer
PERSON
in their Studies on
Hysteria
PERSON
(
1895
DATE
)” (“Die Freud’sche psychoanalytische
Methode
PERSON
” [1904],
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
3-10
CARDINAL
; “
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Procedure
ORG
,” SE,
7
DATE
,
249
CARDINAL
-54). The text continues: “The changes which
Freud
ORG
introduced in
Breuer
GPE
’s cathartic method of treatment were at
first
ORDINAL
changes in technique” (p.
250
CARDINAL
): abandonment of hypnosis, conversation between
two
CARDINAL
people equally awake, abandonment of voluntary psychic control, free
play of associations, the “rule” of saying everything, even what seems
unimportant, irrelevant, nonsensical, embarrassing or distressing. An
article of the same period, “On Psychotherapy” (
1905
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
13
CARDINAL
-26;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
257
CARDINAL
-68, speaks of “therapeutic procedure,” “technique of treatment,” and
“method of treatment” in the same context as the preceding article—that
of the confrontation with
Breuer
ORG
. In
1914
DATE
, in “
Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through
WORK_OF_ART
”
(“Erinnern, Wiederholen
Technique is here taken in the narrow sense of therapy aimed at healing;
the method of investigation is distinguished from it as the art of
interpretation.
WORK_OF_ART
However, a number of other texts dealing with the psychoanalytic
technique authorize us to take the word to include both method of
investigation, and technique in the narrow sense of therapeutic
procedure. This extension is grounded in the nature of the concrete
analytic procedure, in which the method of investigation is regarded as
the “intellectual” part of a technique. This broad sense of the word
“technique” can be broken down into
three
CARDINAL
ideas. From the side of the analyst the analytic procedure, from start
to finish, is a “work,” to which corresponds, on the part of the
analysand, another work, the work of gaining insight whereby he
cooperates in his own analysis. This work in turn reveals a
third
ORDINAL
form of work, of which the patient was unaware—the mechanism of his neurosis. These
three
CARDINAL
ideas go together to form the content of the psychoanalytic concept of technique.
Why
is analysis a work? Primarily and essentially because analysis is a
struggle against the patient’s resistances. <271><272> From
this point
und
Durcharbeiten
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
126
CARDINAL
-36; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
147
CARDINAL
-56), the “technique of psychoanalysis” is again opposed to
Breuer
ORG
’s catharsis.
On the analytic relation and transference, cf.
J. Lacan
PERSON
, “
Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je
WORK_OF_ART
telle qu’elle nous est revelee dans l’experience analytique,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
13
CARDINAL
(
1949
DATE
),
449
CARDINAL
-55; “
La direction de la
WORK_OF_ART
cure et les principes de son pouvoir,”
La Psychanalyse
WORK_OF_ART
,
5
CARDINAL
(
1959
DATE
),
1-20
CARDINAL
.
D.
NORP
Lagache
ORG
, “Le probleme du transfert,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
16
CARDINAL
,
5
CARDINAL
-115.
B. Grunberger
PERSON
, “
Essai
PERSON
sur la situation analytique et le processus de guerison,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
23
CARDINAL
(
1959
DATE
),
367
CARDINAL
-79.
E. Amado Levy-Valensi
PERSON
,
Les Rapports
ORG
intersubjectifs en psychanalyse (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1962
DATE
).
J. P. Valabrega
PERSON
,
La
PERSON
relation therapeutique (
Paris
GPE
,
Flammarion
ORG
,
1962
DATE
).
S. Nacht
PERSON
,
La Presence
GPE
du psychanalyste (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1963
DATE
).
C. Stein
PERSON
, “
La Situation
WORK_OF_ART
analytique . . . ,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
28 (1964
DATE
),
235
CARDINAL
-49.
<
272
CARDINAL
> The struggle against the resistances is at the basis of
Freud
ORG
’s rejection of
Breuer
ORG
’s cathartic method and his use of hypnosis: “The objection to hypnosis
is that it conceals the resistance and for that reason has obstructed
the physician’s insight into the play of psychical forces” {SE,
7
DATE
,
252
CARDINAL
). In the
1905
DATE
article: “I have another reproach to make against this method, namely,
that it conceals from us all insight into the play of mental forces; it
does not permit us, for example, to recognize the resistance with which
the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own
recovery; yet it is this phenomenon of resistance which alone makes it
possible to understand his behavior in
daily
DATE
life” {SE,
7
CARDINAL
,
261
CARDINAL
). Speaking in
1910
DATE
of
“The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy”
WORK_OF_ART
{
GW
PERSON
,
8
DATE
, 104—15;
SE
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
of view the art of interpretation is subordinated to the
analytic technique as soon as the latter is defined as the struggle
against resistances; if there is something to interpret, it is because
there is a distortion of the ideas that have become unconscious; but if
there is a distortion, it is because a resistance has been opposed to
their conscious reproduction. <273><274> The resistances
that lie at the origin of the neurosis are also those obstructing
insight and every analytic procedure. Hence the rules of the art of
interpretation are themselves part of the art of handling the
resistances.
141
CARDINAL
-51),
Freud
ORG
characterizes his “innovations in the field of technique” in these terms: “There are now
two
CARDINAL
aims in psychoanalytic technique: to save the physician effort and to
give the patient the most unrestricted access to his unconscious. As you
know, our technique has undergone a fundamental transformation. At the
time of the cathartic treatment what we aimed at was the elucidation of
the symptoms; we then turned away from the symptoms and devoted
ourselves instead to uncovering the ‘complexes,’ to use a word which
Jung
PERSON
has made indispensable; now, however, our work is aimed directly at
finding out and overcoming the ‘resistances,’ and we can justifiably
rely on the complexes coming to light without difficulty as soon as the
resistances have been recognized and removed” (SE,
11
DATE
,
144
CARDINAL
).
<
274
CARDINAL
> The earliest text we have cited explicitly ties together analytic
technique, resistance, distortion, art of interpretation (
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
251
CARDINAL
-52).
Thus the correlation between hermeneutics and energetics,
which we have focused on throughout this chapter, reappears in a
decisive manner on the level of praxis, as a correlation between the art
of interpretation and the work against the resistances: “to translate”
the unconscious into the conscious and “to do away with the constraint”
resulting from the resistances are one and the same thing. To interpret
and to work coincide. In certain cases, moreover, the art of
interpretation must be sacrificed to the strategy of countering the
resistances, and hence to technique. Thus
Freud
ORG
advises beginners not to make the art of complete dream-interpretation
an end in itself, for to do so would be to fall into the trap of the
resistance, which will take advantage of the slowness of the
interpretation in order to delay the treatment. <
275
CARDINAL
> This limit case clearly
the analyst should employ the art of
dream-interpretation in the psychoanalytic treatment of patients” is a
question of “technique” (p.
91
CARDINAL
). It is in this connection that
Freud
ORG
speaks of the analyst’s “work” (p.
92
CARDINAL
). The expression is appropriate, for this is where the analyst’s
interest in making an accurate and complete interpretation may collide
with the overall strategy unless the analyst has recognized, in the
patient's profusion of dreams, a ruse on the part of the resistances; it
is for these reasons that the right use of interpretation and the rules
governing its use (pp.
92
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
) are part of the analytic “technique.” The title of the paper is thus fully justified: “The
Handling
PERSON
. . .” (Handhabung).
shows in what sense the rules of interpretation are rules of technique.
The primacy of technique over interpretation brings out the full significance of a
Freudian
NORP
leitmotiv: “It is not easy to play upon the instrument of the mind”; the remark alludes to the words of
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
, “
’Sblood
ORG
, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”; analytic
treatment costs the patient sincerity, time, and money, but it costs the
physician study and technical skill. <
276
CARDINAL
> And these
two
CARDINAL
“works” answer to one another; the work of the analyst is like that of
the patient: if the analyst wants to play with the terrible forces of
sexuality, he must have “overcome in his own mind that mixture of
prurience and prudery with which, unfortunately, so many people
habitually consider sexual problems”; the requirement that future
practitioners undergo training in analysis finds
one
CARDINAL
of its most important justifications here. <
277
CARDINAL
>
<
276
CARDINAL
> One should read the short paper of
1912
DATE
,
“Recommendations to Physicians
ORG
Practising Psychoanalysis,”
GW
PERSON
,
8
DATE
,
267
CARDINAL
-87;
SE
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
111-20
CARDINAL
, where
Freud
ORG
lays out in detail the rules of this technical skill: the effort of
remembering names, dates, associations, and pathological products; the
maintenance of evenly suspended attention so that the analyst does not
unduly select from the material he hears, etc. All such rules are the
counterpart to the fundamental rule laid down for the patient.
Corresponding to the “total communication” on the part of the patient is
the “total listening” on the part of the analyst. But this total
listening relates to the necessary psychoanalytic purification of the
doctor himself, and hence, once again, to the reduction of resistances.
Other technical rules follow from this affective discipline which cannot
be foreseen a priori by a psychology of consciousness: for example, the
rule of remaining opaque to one’s patients, of foregoing all educative
ambition as well as all therapeutic ambition, etc.
<
277
CARDINAL
> “On
Psychotherapy
ORG
,” SE,
7
DATE
,
267
CARDINAL
. In
1910
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
expressly linked the necessity of training analysis to that of recognizing and overcoming the “countertransference”
(“
WORK_OF_ART
The Future Prospects of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,” SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
144
CARDINAL
-45).
Mastery of the technical rules is what distinguishes
authentic psychoanalysis from “wild” psychoanalysis, a compound of
scientific ignorance and technical errors. Misunderstanding the mental
factors in sexuality and the role of repression in the patient’s
inability to achieve satisfaction, “wild” analysis commits the major
technical error of attributing the patient’s illness to his ignorance of
the mental forces at work:
The pathological factor is not his
ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner
resistances; it was they that
first
ORDINAL
called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The
task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing the
patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is
only one
CARDINAL
of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. . . . informing the
patient of his unconscious regularly results in an intensification of
the conflict in him and an exacerbation of his troubles.
This
text throws much light on our present discussion: mere improvement in
ordinary awareness cannot substitute for analytic technique, for the
problem is not to replace ignorance with knowledge, but to overcome the
resistances.
At the same time, the text neatly shows the correspondence be-
83
CARDINAL
. “‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis” (
1910
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
118
CARDINAL
-25; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
225
CARDINAL
. The case alluded to in this paper occasions one of
Freud
ORG
’s most important discussions of the distinction between mental
satisfaction and physical need in human sexuality; “In psychoanalysis
the concept of what is sexual comprises far more; it goes lower and also
higher than its popular sense. This extension is justified genetically;
we reckon as belonging to ‘sexual life’ all the activities of the
tender feelings which have primitive sexual impulses as their source,
even when those impulses have become inhibited in regard to their
original sexual aim or have exchanged this aim for another which is no
longer sexual. For this reason we prefer to speak of psychosexuality,
thus laying stress on the point that the mental factor in sexual life
should not be overlooked or underestimated. We use the word ‘sexuality’
in the same comprehensive sense as that in which the
German
NORP
language uses the word lieben [‘to
love’
GPE
]. We have long known, too, that mental absence of satisfaction with all
its consequences can exist where there is no lack of normal sexual
intercourse; and as therapists we always bear in mind that the
unsatisfied sexual trends (whose substitutive satisfactions in the form
of nervous symptoms we combat) can often find only very inadequate
outlet in coitus or other sexual acts” (pp.
222
CARDINAL
-23).
tween the work of the analyst and the work of the
analysand. In the present context, the concept of work does not
designate the mechanism of dreams and the neuroses; later I will try to
show how this latter work, as applied to the group of processes in which
the mental dynamism objectifies itself, is the key concept which
reconciles the reality of the energies set in motion and the ideality of
deciphered meaning. Here I limit myself to the mental work of the
process of achieving insight within the analytic work.
The work
of the analyst and that of the analysand are conjoined in the struggle
against the resistances. The work on the part of the patient is “to
accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now,
in consequence of this automatic regulation by unpleasure, he has
rejected (repressed).” For it must not be forgotten, the sole principle
of repression is unpleasure. Thus the reeducation involved in overcoming
the resistances is a struggle with the pleasure-unpleasure principle.
Hypnosis dispensed with this “mental work,” but it cannot be avoided.
Analysis,
Freud
ORG
repeats, is costly to the patient: it costs time, it costs money; above
all it requires total sincerity. The fundamental rule—the famous rule,
the single rule, that of saying everything, whatever the cost—is the
patient’s great contribution to the work of the analysis. Here, to speak
is a work. This surrender to whatever comes to mind implies a change in
the patient’s conscious attitude toward his illness and
84
DATE
. See below,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
2
CARDINAL
,
second
ORDINAL
section.
85
CARDINAL
. Once again
Freud
ORG
remainds us that psychoanalysis is a profession that requires
familiarization with a technique acquired through long and slow effort
(SE,
11
DATE
,
226
CARDINAL
); that too is why psychoanalysis must be organized as a recognized
profession and the title of analyst guaranteed by an international
psychoanalytical association (p.
227
CARDINAL
). On the relationship between interpretation, the communication of the
interpretation, and the dynamics of treatment, see the important paper “
On Beginning the Treatment
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
454
CARDINAL
-78; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
-44, especially pp.
141
CARDINAL
-44.
86
CARDINAL
. Under this heading is included not only the patient’s regular and
punctual attendance at the sessions but also the difficult question as
to how long the treatment will take. In this connection we should pause
over
one
CARDINAL
of
Freud
ORG
’s remarks, in view of the importance we place on all his references to
the problem of time: “To shorten analytic treatment is a justifiable
wish. . . . Unfortunately, it is opposed by a very important factor,
namely, the slowness with which the deep-going changes in the mind are
accomplished—
ORG
in the last resort, no doubt, the ‘timelessness’ of our unconscious processes” (ibid., p.
130
CARDINAL
).
hence a different sort of attention and courage than is exercised in directed thinking.
The
great work of “becoming conscious” is the process of understanding, of
remembering, of recognizing the past and of recognizing oneself in that
past. As we have often said in examining
Freud
ORG
’s theoretical writings, the process of achieving insight involves an
economic problem that completely distinguishes psychoanalysis from
phenomenology. What we touched upon from the analyst’s point of view is
again encountered from the viewpoint of the patient: the communication
of an interpretation is of no value unless it can be incorporated into
the work of achieving insight. A premature communication will only
result in a reinforcement of the resistances. The process of treatment
has its own dynamics, according to which the purely intellectual factor
of understanding functions as an important but subordinate factor in the
liquidation of the resistances; that is why the analyst’s
interpretation has to be subordinated to the general analytic strategy:
the place of “knowledge” within the strategy of resistance must itself
be taught by the rules of the art.
“Working-through” (
Durcharbeiten
PERSON
) is the term
Freud
ORG
proposes for the patient’s hard labor with his resistances, a work
carried out by means of interpretation and transference and in accord
with the fundamental rule of analysis:
Only when the resistance
is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient,
discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the
resistance . . . This working-through of the resistances may in practice
turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a
trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work
which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which
distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by
suggestion.
The fact that the achieving of intellectual insight
is included within the mental work enables us to reexamine a problem we
have investigated on the plane of metapsychology—namely, the top-
87. “
Remembering, Repeating
WORK_OF_ART
, and
Working-Through
ORG
,” SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
155
CARDINAL
-56.
88
CARDINAL
. Similar remarks are to be found in
“Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy”
ORG
(
1918
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
183
CARDINAL
-94; SE,
17
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
-68: “The work by which we bring the repressed mental material into the
patient’s consciousness has been called by us psychoanalysis” (p.
159
CARDINAL
).
Freud
ORG
then goes
ographic representation of the psychism. The
justification for the topographic differentiation into systems is to be
found in praxis; the “remoteness” between the systems and their
separation by the “barrier” of repression are the exact pictorial
transcription of
the “work”
EVENT
that provides access to the area of the repressed. “The patients now
know of the repressed experience in their conscious thought, but this
thought lacks any connection with the place where the repressed
recollection is in some way or other contained. No change is possible
until the conscious thought-process has penetrated to that place and has
overcome the resistances of repression there.”
<278><279><280>
on to develop the analogy
between psychoanalysis and chemical analysis: “We have analyzed the
patient-—that is, separated his mental processes into their elementary
constituents and demonstrated these instinctual elements in him singly
and in isolation” (p.
160
CARDINAL
). But
Freud
ORG
rejects the notion of a psychosynthesis and states he finds no meaning
in the task that would consist in making “a new and a better
combination” (p.
233
CARDINAL
). We will discuss this point in
Chapter 3
LAW
.
<
279
CARDINAL
> “
On Beginning the Treatment
WORK_OF_ART
,” SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
142
CARDINAL
.
<
280
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
143
CARDINAL
.
Not only the topographic point of view, but also the economic point of view of the metapsychology is justified by praxis.
Therapy
ORG
derives its energy from the patient’s suffering and his wish to be
cured; the strength of this energy is countered by various forces, among
them the “secondary gain” the patient gets from his illness. The
analytic investigation enters into this “economy” by arousing new
energies capable of overcoming the resistances, and by showing special
paths along which to direct those energies.00 In this way the economic
problem of therapy leads us to the most difficult question of analytic
technique, the question of transference. For the transference is
regarded as supplying the additional energy envisaged in the previous
text: a treatment,
Freud
ORG
says, “only deserves the name [of a psychoanalysis] if the intensity of
the transference has been utilized for the overcoming of resistances.”
<
281
CARDINAL
>
<
281
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
The moment has come, therefore, to bring to bear upon this
theme the full weight of the difference between phenomenology and
psychoanalysis.
Our constant problem—that of the relation between hermeneutics and energetics—arises for the last time: it is now a matter of
understanding how interpretation, its communication, and the gaining of insight are embodied in the dynamics of transference.
Freud
ORG
stresses the fact that the “handling” of the transference is where the
technical character of psychoanalysis is evidenced in its highest
degree. This too is where the philosopher schooled in phenomenological
reflection realizes his exclusion from an experiential understanding of
what occurs in the analytic relationship. Ultimately, this is where
analytic praxis differs from all its conceivable phenomenological
equivalents. With the question of the transference, the strategy
concerning the resistances takes on a concrete shape. The transference
emerges both as a means of overcoming the early resistances that
contributed to the illness and as a new resistance—as
Freud
ORG
says, the most powerful resistance to the treatment. On the one hand,
the resistances can be overcome only if the traumatic situation is
transposed into the closed field of
92
CARDINAL
. “Thus the new sources of strength for which the patient is indebted to
his analyst are reducible to transference and instruction (through the
communication made to him)” (ibid., pp.
143
CARDINAL
-44). Returning to the same difficulty in
1914
DATE
, in “
Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through
WORK_OF_ART
,”
Freud
ORG
stresses his opposition to Breuer and adds the following remarks.
Breuer’s catharsis aimed at the recall of memories, which was to be
achieved through the work of interpretation and the communication of its
results; but if the essential point is the struggle against the
resistances, then the search for former happenings and situations must
give precedence to the interpretation of the resistances themselves:
“Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used
today
DATE
, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment
or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is
present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and he
employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing
the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the
patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labor: the
doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when
these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the
forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty. The aim of
these different techniques has, of course, remained the same.
Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically
speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression” (
SE
PERSON
,
12
DATE
,
147—48
CARDINAL
).
93
CARDINAL
. “
The Dynamics of Transference
ORG
” (
1912
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
364
CARDINAL
-74; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
99-108
CARDINAL
. In this text
Freud
ORG
presents as a puzzle the fact that transference is a factor of
resistance, “whereas outside analysis it must be regarded as the vehicle
of cure and the condition of success” (p.
101
CARDINAL
). “The solution of the puzzle is that transference to the doctor is
suitable for resistance to the treatment only in so far as it is a
negative transference or a positive transference of repressed erotic
impulses” (p.
105
CARDINAL
).
the analytic relationship; on the other hand, the
transference emerges precisely at the point where it can satisfy the
resistance the analytic tactics have tracked down.
In the course
of this fight against the resistances in the transference situation
there is revealed a further aspect of the dialectic between hermeneutics
and energetics. We have seen that the original goal of analytic
technique was not only affective discharge or abreaction but also
remembering, a process directly aimed at by
Breuer
PERSON
’s catharsis. But remembering is also an intellectual phenomenon, an insight into
the past as past
DATE
. Little by little it came to be seen that the remembering of
unconscious material is of less importance than the recognition of the
resistances. But above all, it was seen that remembering is in many
cases replaced by an actual repetition of the traumatic situation:
instead of remembering the past, the patient repeats it by acting it
out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it. This strange
turn of events is more important than it might at first appear. No
phenomenology of intersubjectivity can parallel this automatism of
repetition, which is part of a very significant sequence—resistance,
transference, repetition; this sequence is the core of the analytic
situation. Thus the fight against the resistances, the handling of the
transference, and the recourse to repetition form the main constellation
of the analytic technique; its tactic consists in using the
transference to curb the patient’s compulsion to repeat in order to lead
him back along the paths of remembering. It is understandable why
Freud
ORG
states that the handling of the transference presents far more serious difficulties than the interpretation of the patient’s
associations
ORG
.
94
CARDINAL
. “
Observations on Transference-Love
ORG
” (
1914
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
306
CARDINAL
-21; SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
159-71
DATE
.
95
CARDINAL
. “We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of
repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten
past not only onto the doctor but also onto all the other aspects of the
current situation. . . . The part played by resistance, too, is easily
recognized. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting
out (repetition) replace remembering”
(“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” SE, 12, 151).
WORK_OF_ART
The analytic technique consists in letting the repetition occur, and
thus it runs counter to the direct technique of remembering that was
employed in
Breuer
GPE
’s catharsis. On “acting out,” cf.
“Observations on Transference-Love
WORK_OF_ART
,” SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
65-66
DATE
.
96
CARDINAL
. “The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to
repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the
handling
Our main interest here lies less in therapy than in the
philosophical implications of this situation. From this point of view
the most impressive difficulty, the
one
CARDINAL
offering the greatest challenge to a phenomenological approach to
psychoanalysis, is the difficulty concerning the management of
transference-love: the height of technique lies in the art of exploiting
the transference-love without satisfying it.
Freud
ORG
went so far as to write that this is “a fundamental principle which
will probably dominate our work in this field”; he enunciates the
principle as follows: “
Analytic
NORP
treatment should be carried through, as far as is possible, under privation—in a state of abstinence.” <
282><283
CARDINAL
> This rule, it would seem, has no phenomenological equivalent. What
is it getting at? We are here at the heart of the economic problem of
the analytic relationship; it is no longer merely upon the patient’s
resistances that the analyst learns to “play,” but upon the other’s
pleasure and unpleasure in the form of privation or frustration. In
order to understand this point one must go back to the original
situation and to the frustration generated by the conflict between
instinct and resistance; the whole theory of symptoms is based upon that
initial frustration; a symptom, from the economic point of view, is
nothing else than a substitute form of
of the transference. We
render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the
right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the
transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost
complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything
in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s
mind. . . . The transference thus creates an intermediate region between
illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the
other is made” (
SE
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
154
CARDINAL
). To these texts should be added the important short paper
“Observations on Transference-Love”
ORG
(cf. above, n.
94
CARDINAL
); in it
Freud
ORG
deals with the difficulties in the handling of the transference and
tell us they are far more serious than the ones encountered in the
interpretation of associations (SE,
12
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
).
<
283
CARDINAL
>
“Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy
ORG
,” SE,
17
CARDINAL
,
162
CARDINAL
. The practice of this rule is exemplified in
“Observations on Transference-Love
ORG
”: “The patient’s need and longing should be allowed to persist in her,
in order that they may serve as forces impelling her to do work and to
make changes, and ... we must beware of appeasing those forces by means
of surrogates” (
SE
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
165
CARDINAL
). And further on: “The course the analyst must pursue is . . .
one
CARDINAL
for which there is no model in real life. He must take care not to
steer away from the transference-love, or to repulse it or to make it
distasteful to the patient; but he must just as resolutely withhold any
response to it” (p.
166
CARDINAL
).
satisfaction; on the other hand, the failure of that tactic
of substitution is what sustains the instinctual force impelling the
patient toward recovery. When placed within this dynamic context, the
frustration, actively sustained by the analytic tactics, is justified.
It is important not to diminish the instinctual force; if the patient’s
suffering becomes mitigated, “we must re-instate it elsewhere in the
form of some appreciable privation.” <
284
CARDINAL
> Thus the analyst’s work, which we described at
first
ORDINAL
as a struggle against the resistances, is now seen as a struggle
against substitute satisfactions—precisely in the transference where the
patient is particularly looking for such satisfaction. For the
phenomenologist, this technique of frustration is the most surprising
aspect of the analytic method; he can no doubt understand the rule of
veracity, but not the principle of frustration: the latter can only be
practiced.
<
284
CARDINAL
>
“Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy
ORG
,” SE,
17
CARDINAL
,
163
CARDINAL
.
If we now connect the point of arrival with the point of
departure of these reflections on the technique of the analytic
relationship, we have this to say: That which makes the analytic
relationship possible as an intersubjective relation is indeed, as we
said at the beginning, the fact that the analytic dialogue, within a
special context of disengagement, of isolation, of derealization, brings
to light the demand in which desire ultimately consists; but only the
technique of transference, as a technique of frustration, could reveal
the fact that desire is at bottom an unanswered demand . . .
The
two
CARDINAL
attempts to reformulate psychoanalysis,
first
ORDINAL
in terms of scientific psychology, then in terms of phenomenology, have
failed, and the unique character of analytic discourse is confirmed by
that double failure. On the one hand, the operative concepts of academic
psychology do not constitute a better formulation of the analytic
concepts; on the other hand, as
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
said in the
Preface
ORG
to
Hesnard
PERSON
’s
L’Oeuvre de Freud
ORG
, phenomenology does not say “in a clear way what psychoanalysis said in
a confused way; it is rather by what it only hints at or reveals at its
limit—by its latent content or its unconscious—that phenomenology is in
harmony with psychoanalysis.” <
285
CARDINAL
>
<
285
CARDINAL
>
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
, Preface to
A. Hesnard
PERSON
,
L’Oeuvre de Freud
ORG
et son importance pour le monde moderne (
1960
DATE
). I adopt most of the remarks of this preface as well as its general movement. It is necessary, the author
I
have tried to show that psychoanalysis is a unique and irreducible form
of praxis; as such, it puts its finger on what phenomenology never
perfectly attains, namely, “our relation to our origins and our relation
to our models, the id and the superego.” <
286
CARDINAL
>
says, to go beyond a
first
ORDINAL
formulation of the relations between phenomenology and psychoanalysis,
where phenomenology would play the role of an unperturbed mentor
correcting misunderstandings and supplying categories and means of
expression to a technique that reasons poorly and is poorly thought out.
In order to remain itself, in convergence with the
Freudian
NORP
research, phenomenology must
first
ORDINAL
carry through the movement of descent “into its own subsoil” (p.
8)
CARDINAL
. Having started from “that infinite curiosity, that ambition to see
everything, which animates the phenomenological reduction” (p.
7
CARDINAL
), phenomenology must subject its own problematic to the unsettling
questions of the body, of time, of intersubjectivity, of the
consciousness of things or the world, where being is now “all around
[consciousness] instead of laid out before it . . . oneiric being, by
definition hidden” (p.
8)
CARDINAL
. This phenomenology, on guard against its own idealism, will then also
be able to concern itself with protecting psychoanalysis from its own
success, and a contributing factor here could be a phenomenological
reformulation. “The idealist deviation in
Freudian
NORP
research is
today
DATE
just as much a threat as its objectivist deviation.
One
CARDINAL
is forced to ask whether it is not essential to psychoanalysis—I mean
to its existence as therapy and as verifiable knowledge—to remain, not
of course a poor attempt and an occult science, but at least a paradox
and a question” (p.
8)
CARDINAL
. I highly value and adopt as my own this remark of one who did so much
to break the charm of “the scientistic or objectivistic ideology” (p.
5
CARDINAL
) of psychoanalysis: “In any case the energic or mechanistic metaphors guard, against any idealistic leanings, the threshold of
one
CARDINAL
of the most valuable intuitions in
Freudian
NORP
theory: the intuition of our archeology” (p.
9
CARDINAL
). To grasp the importance of this preface, see
J. B. Pontalis
PERSON
, “Note sur le probleme de l’inconscient chez
Merleau-Ponty
ORG
,”
Les Temps modernes
WORK_OF_ART
, (
1961
DATE
),
287
CARDINAL
-303.
100
CARDINAL
. Ibid. Cf.
A. Hesnard
PERSON
,
Apport de la
PERSON
phenomenologie a la psychiatrie contemporaine (
Masson
PERSON
,
1959
DATE
).
A. Green
PERSON
, “L’lnconscient freudien et la psychanalyse franchise contemporaine,
” Les Temps modernes, 18 (1962)
WORK_OF_ART
,
365-79
CARDINAL
;
“Du Comportement
ORG
a la chair: itineraire
de Merleau-Ponty
ORG
,”
Critique
GPE
(
1964
DATE
),
1017-46
DATE
.
Chapter 2
LAW
: Reflection: An Archeology of the Subject
The task of this
chapter is to bring the results of the preceding epistemological
discussion to the level of philosophical reflection. It must be kept in
mind that our enterprise is strictly philosophical and in no way binding
on the psychoanalyst as such. For the analyst, psychoanalytic theory is
sufficiently understood through its relation to the method of
investigation and the therapeutic technique. But this “sufficient”
understanding—in the sense in which
Plato
ORG
says, in an important methodological text, that the explanations of the
geometers stop with “something sufficient,” which does not suffice for
the philosopher —is not fully transparent to itself. If, as we have
asserted in
the “Problematic
ORG
,” the / think, I am is the reflective foundation of every proposition concerning man, the question is how
Freud
ORG
’s mixed discourse enters into a philosophy which is deliberately reflective.
In
opposing all psychologizing or idealizing reductions of psychoanalysis,
and in admitting the irreducibility of the theory’s most realistic and
naturalistic aspects, we have not made the solution to the problem any
easier. The idea guiding me is this: the philosophical place of analytic
discourse is defined by the concept of an archeology of the subject.
But thus far this concept has remained a mere word. How can we give it a
meaning? It is not one of
Freud
ORG
’s concepts, nor do we intend to impose it upon the reading of
Freud
ORG
or use some stratagem to discover it in his works. It is a concept that I form in order to understand myself in reading
Freud
ORG
. I stress the peculiar nature of this constituting operation and
distinguish it from the preceding methodological discussion, which
remained on the sufficient level of as yet unfounded concepts.
The steps of reflection will be the following:
1.
First
ORDINAL
, it must be made clear that it is in reflection and for reflection that
psychoanalysis is an archeology; it is an archeology of the subject.
But of what subject? What must the subject of reflection be if it is
likewise to be the subject of psychoanalysis?
2
CARDINAL
. This
twofold
CARDINAL
adjustment of the question of the subject will enable us finally to
assign a philosophical locus to the entire preceding epistemological
discussion, and to integrate the methodological paradox of the
first
ORDINAL
chapter into the field of reflection. With this section we conclude our epistemological examination of
Freudianism
ORG
.
3
CARDINAL
. Turning next to the
Freudian
NORP
theses themselves, we will elaborate the concept of archeology within
the limits of a philosophy of reflection. We do not claim that this
concept contains a full understanding of
Freudianism
ORG
. The remainder of this book will amply demonstrate that the understanding of
Freudianism
ORG
requires a new advance of thought.
FREUD AND THE QUESTION OF
THE SUBJECT
WORK_OF_ART
It is one and the same enterprise to understand
Freudianism
ORG
as a discourse about the subject and to discover that the subject is
never the subject one thinks it is. The reflective reinterpretation of
Freudianism
ORG
cannot help but alter our notion of reflection: as the understanding of
Freudianism
ORG
is changed, so is the understanding of oneself.
What should point the way for us here is the absence in
Freudianism
NORP
of any radical questioning about the existential and thinking subject.
Freud
ORG
very clearly ignores and rejects any problematic of the primal or
fundamental subject. We have repeatedly emphasized this flight from the
question of the / think, I am. The
Cogito
PERSON
does not and cannot figure in a topographic and economic theory of
systems or agencies; it cannot possibly be objectified in a psychical
locality or a role; it denotes something altogether different from what
could be spelled out in a theory of instincts and their vicissitudes.
Hence it is the very factor that escapes analytic conceptualization. Are
we to look for it in the consciousness? Consciousness
presents
itself as the representative of the external world, as a surface
function, as a mere sign or character in the developed formula
Cs.-Pcpt
PERSON
, Are we looking for the ego? What we find is the id. Shall we turn from
the id to the dominating agency? What we meet is the superego. Shall we
try to reach the ego in its function of affirmation, defense,
expansion? What we discover is narcissism, the great screen between self
and oneself. The circle has come full turn and the ego of the cogito
sum has escaped each time. This flight from the egological foundation is
very instructive. It does not at all signify the failure of analytic
theory; this very flight from the primal [I’originaire] must now be
understood as a stage of reflection.
Let us start with the passage in
Husserl
PERSON
’s
Cartesian Meditations
ORG
(§
9
CARDINAL
) cited above. “Adequacy and apodicticity of evidence need not go hand
in hand.” As I see it, this proposition provides the framework in which
the
Freudian
NORP
problematic can be thought and reflected upon. It should be read in
both directions. On the one hand, it implies that the inadequacy
concerning consciousness is accompanied by the apodicticity of the
Cogito
PERSON
: there is a point invincible to every doubt, which
Husserl
PERSON
calls “
one
CARDINAL
’s living selfpresence,” and to which the phenomenological reduction
gives access; without this radical recourse, every problematic
concerning human reality is truncated. On the other hand, one cannot
attest to the apodicticity of the
Cogito
PERSON
without at the same time recognizing the inadequacy concerning
consciousness; the possibility that I am deceived, in every ontic
statement I pronounce about myself, is coextensive with the certitude of
the
1
CARDINAL
think: “The living evidence of the I am is no longer given but only presumed.” And
Husserl
PERSON
could add, “This presumption, co-implicit in apodictic evidence,
requires a critique that would determine apodictically the range of its
possibilities of fulfillment.” <287><288> At the very heart
of the certitude of the I am there remains the question: “How far can
the transcendental ego be deceived about itself? And how far do those
components extend that are absolutely indubitable in spite of such
possible deception?” <
289
CARDINAL
>
<
287
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. the rest of the text, p.
377
CARDINAL
, n.
43
CARDINAL
.
<
288
FAC
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
289
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Starting from these fundamental propositions, it is possible to work through the entire
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology in a reflective manner that reproduces all the steps of
the metapsychology, but in a different philosophical dimension. All that
Freud
ORG
objectifies in a quasi-physical reality, all the models that
contemporary epistemological criticism can distinguish in his
representation of the mental apparatus, all this must become a stage of
reflection.
First
ORDINAL
and foremost, what must be reproduced is his critique of immediate consciousness. In this regard I consider the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology an extraordinary discipline of reflection: like
Hegel
PERSON
’s Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
, but in the reverse direction, it achieves a decentering of the home of
significations, a displacement of the birthplace of meaning. By this
displacement, immediate consciousness finds itself dispossessed to the
advantage of another agency of meaning—the transcendence of speech or
the emergence of desire. This dispossession, which the
Freudian
NORP
systematization requires of us in its own way, is to be achieved as a
kind of ascesis of reflection, the meaning and necessity of which appear
only afterward, as the recompense for an unjustified risk. So long as
we have not actually taken this step, we do not really understand what
we are saying when we state that the philosophy of reflection is not a
psychology of consciousness. If this statement is to be concretely
meaningful, we must widen the gap between the positing of reflection,
which we have said is apodictic, and the pretension of consciousness,
which we have admitted, if only in principle, to be inadequate, capable
of mistakes and self-deception. We must really lose hold of
consciousness and its pretension of ruling over meaning, in order to
save reflection and its indomitable assurance. This is what the path
through the meta psycho logy (short of psychoanalytic practice) can give
the philosopher—and I say “give,” not “take from.”
The necessity of this dispossession is what justifies
Freud
ORG
’s naturalism. If the viewpoint of consciousness is—from the outset and
for the most part—a false point of view, I must make use of the
Freudian
NORP
systematization, its topography and economics, as a “discipline” aimed
at making me completely homeless, at dispossessing me of that illusory
Cogito
PERSON
which at the outset occupies the place of
the founding act, I think, I am. The path through the
Freudian
NORP
topography and economics simply expresses the necessary discipline of
an antiphenomenology. At the conclusion of this process, aimed at
undoing the would-be evidence of consciousness, I will no longer know
the meaning of object, subject, or even thought; the avowed aim of this
discipline is to shake the false knowledge which blocks access to
the Ego Cogito Cogitatum
PERSON
. This dispossession of immediate consciousness is governed by the
construction of a model, or set of models, in which consciousness itself
figures as
one
CARDINAL
of the places. Thus consciousness is
one
CARDINAL
of the agencies in the triad unconscious-preconscious-conscious. In its
turn, this topographical or topological picture of the mental apparatus
is inseparable from an economic explanation, according to which the
self-regulation of the apparatus is assured by placements and
displacements of energy and by mobile or bound cathexes. For those of us
who are not psychoanalysts, who do not have to diagnose and heal, the
adoption of this topographic and economic discourse can be meaningful,
and meaningful within reflection. By definitively dissociating the
apo-dicticity of reflection from the evidence of immediate
consciousness, the antiphenomenology of the
Freudian
NORP
topography and energetics can function as a moment of reflection.
I propose that we reexamine this dispossession of immediate consciousness by retracing the movement of the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology as presented in
Freud
GPE
’s language in
Chapter 3
LAW
of our “
Analytic
NORP
.” We saw that this problematic split into
two
CARDINAL
lines or paths. The
first
ORDINAL
path, clearly stated in “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
,” led us from the descriptive point of view, which is still that of
immediate consciousness, to the topographic and economic point of view,
in which consciousness becomes
one
CARDINAL
of the psychical localities. The
second
ORDINAL
path led us back from the instinctual representatives, which are
already psychical factors, to their derivatives in consciousness. This
double movement becomes understandable in a discipline of reflection.
The dispossession of consciousness implies the attainment of the
topographic-economic point of view. In this point of view the place of
meaning is displaced from consciousness toward the unconscious. But this
place cannot be reified as a region of the world. Consequently, the
first
ORDINAL
task—the displacement—cannot be sepa-
rated from the
second
ORDINAL
task—the recapture of meaning in interpretation. This alternation of
relinquishing [deprise] and recapture [reprise] is the philosophical
basis of the entire metapsychology. If it is true that the language of
desire is a discourse combining meaning and force, reflection, in order
to get at the root of desire, must let itself be dispossessed of the
conscious meaning of discourse and displaced to another place of
meaning. This is the moment of dispossession, of relinquishing. But
since desire is accessible only in the disguises in which it displaces
itself, it is only by interpreting the signs of desire that one can
recapture in reflection the emergence of desire and thus enlarge
reflection to the point where it regains what it had lost.
Such is the meaning, for reflection, of the
two
CARDINAL
paths of the “
Analytic
NORP
,” the path from the descriptive concept of consciousness to the concept
of instinct and instinctual vicissitude, and the path from the
instinctual representatives to their derivatives in consciousness.
Let us retrace the
first
ORDINAL
path. It starts with a reversal of point of view: the unconscious is no
longer defined in relationship to consciousness as a state of absence
or latency, but as a locality in which ideas or representations reside;
anticipating the present analysis, we called this reversal of viewpoint
an antiphenomenology, an epoche in reverse. That remains true, for what
we are confronted with is not a reduction to consciousness but a
reduction of consciousness. Consciousness ceases to be what is best
known and becomes problematic.
Henceforward
PERSON
there is a question of consciousness, of the process of becoming-conscious (
Bewusstwerden
PERSON
), in place of the so-called self-evidence of being-conscious [
Bewusstsein
PERSON
). This antiphenomenology must now be seen by us as a phase of
reflection, the moment of the divestiture of reflection. The
topographical concept of the unconscious is the correlate of this
zero degree
QUANTITY
of reflection.
The
second
ORDINAL
step in the destruction of the pseudo evidence of consciousness was
characterized by the abandonment of the concept of object (wished-for
object, hated object, loved object, feared object). The object, as it
presents itself in its false evidence as correlate of consciousness,
must in turn cease to be the guide of analysis: in
Freud
ORG
’s terms, it is a mere variable of the aim of an instinct
4.
Pp
PERSON
.
117
CARDINAL
ff.
(
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”). The notion of instinctual
vicissitudes is thus substituted for the laws of representation of the
old psychology of consciousness. In the context of this instinctual
economy one can attempt to work out a true genesis of the notion of
object, in accordance with the economic distributions of the libido.
Perhaps this ostensible antiphenomenology is merely the long detour at
the end of which the object will again become the transcendental guide,
but for a highly mediated reflection, and not for a supposedly immediate
consciousness. In this regard the later
Husserl
PERSON
indicates the area and direction of research when he structures all
investigation of constitution upon a passive genesis. What remains
peculiar to
Freud
ORG
is to have linked this genesis of the object with the genesis of love and hate.
The
third
ORDINAL
step of the dispossession is characterized by the introduction of
narcissism into psychoanalytic theory. We are now forced to treat the
ego itself as the variable object of an instinct and to form the concept
of ego-instinct (
Ichtrieb)
WORK_OF_ART
in which, as we have said, the ego is no longer the subject of the
Cogito
PERSON
but the object of desire. Furthermore, in the economy of the libido,
the values of subject and object are constantly being interchanged;
there is a pleasure-ego (
Lust-lch
TIME
), correlative to the ego-instinct (
Ichtrieb
PRODUCT
), which exchanges itself for object values on the market of libidinal
investments or cathexes. This is the supreme test for a philosophy of
reflection. What is in question is the very subject of immediate
apperception. Narcissism must be introduced, not only into
psychoanalytic theory, but into reflection. I then discover that as soon
as the apodictic truth I think, I am is uttered, it is blocked by a
pseudo evidence: an abortive
Cogito
PERSON
has already taken the place of the
first
ORDINAL
truth of reflection, I think, I am. At the very heart of the
Ego Cogito
PERSON
I discover an instinct all of whose derived forms point toward something altogether primitive and primordial, which
Freud
ORG
calls primary narcissism. To raise this discovery to the reflective
level is to make the dispossession of the subject of consciousness
coequal with the dispossession, already achieved, of the intended
object.
Here we have reached a sort of end point of the reduction of
5
DATE
.
Cf
PERSON
. pp.
126-28
CARDINAL
.
consciousness and, one might say, of phenomenology as well. In
speaking of the overestimation of the child by his parents, which
Freud
ORG
regards as a reproduction of their own abandoned narcissism (“His Majesty the Baby” shall fulfill all our dreams),
Freud
ORG
writes: “At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the
immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is
achieved by taking refuge in the child.” <
290
CARDINAL
>
<
290
CARDINAL
> “
On Narcissism: An Introduction
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
158
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
91
DATE
.
This “touchy point in the narcissistic system” is what I call the false
Cogito
PERSON
, coextensive with the primal
Cogito
PERSON
. In another famous text,
“A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis”
WORK_OF_ART
(
1917
DATE
),
Freud
ORG
clearly points out the philosophical issues involved in this
challenging of the privileged status of consciousness. In this essay
narcissism appears as a veritable metaphysical entity, a veritable evil
genius, to which must be attributed our most extreme resistance to
truth: “The universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the
present suffered
three
CARDINAL
severe blows from the researches of science.”
First
ORDINAL
, man regarded the central position of the earth as a sign of his
dominating role in the universe, a view that appeared “to fit in very
well with his inclination to regard himself as lord of the world.” Next,
man “acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the
animal kingdom” and presumptuously “began to place a gulf between his
nature and theirs.” Finally, he was convinced that he was master and
lord within his own house, the mind. Psychoanalysis represents the
third
ORDINAL
and “probably the most wounding” of the humiliations dealt to narcissism. After the cosmological blow inflicted by
Copernicus
GPE
, there followed the biological humiliation from the work of
Darwin
PERSON
. And now here is psychoanalysis revealing that “the ego is not master
in its own house”; having already known he is lord neither of the cosmos
nor of the animal kingdom, man discovers he is not even the lord of his
own mind. The
Freudian
NORP
thinker turns to the ego and says:
You feel sure that you are
informed of all that goes on in your mind if it is of any importance at
all, because in that case, you believe, your consciousness gives you
news of it. And if you have had no information of something in your mind
you confidently
assume that it does not exist there. Indeed,
you go so far as to regard what is “mental” as identical with what is
“conscious”— that is, with what is known to you—in spite of the most
obvious evidence that a great deal more must constantly be going on in
your mind than can be known to your consciousness. Come, let yourself be
taught something on this one point! . . . You behave like an absolute
ruler who is content with the information supplied him by his highest
officials and never goes among the people to hear their voice. Turn your
eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn
first
ORDINAL
to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall
ill; and perhaps, you will avoid faffing ill in future. <
291
CARDINAL
>
<
291
CARDINAL
> “
A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
3—12
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
17
CARDINAL
,
137—44
CARDINAL
. On the
Freudian
NORP
personology, cf.
J. Lacan
PERSON
, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du
Je
PERSON
. . . ,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
13
CARDINAL
(
1949
DATE
),
449
CARDINAL
-54;
“Les Formations de 1’inconscient
ORG
,
” Seminaire
WORK_OF_ART
,
1957
DATE
-
58
DATE
,
Bull, de
ORG
psych., No.
11
CARDINAL
.
D.
NORP
Lagache
ORG
, “Fascination de la conscience par le moi,”
La Psychanalyse, 3 (1957), 33-45
WORK_OF_ART
; “
La Psychanalyse et la structure de la personnalite
WORK_OF_ART
,”
La Psychanalyse, 6 (1961), 5-54
WORK_OF_ART
.
P. Luquet
PERSON
,
“Les Identifications
ORG
precoces dans la structuration et la restructuration du moi,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
26
CARDINAL
(
1962
DATE
),
117
CARDINAL
-329;
P. C. Racamier
PERSON
, “Le moi. le soi, la personne et la psychose,”
L’Evol
PERSON
. psychiatr.,
2 (1958
DATE
),
445-66
CARDINAL
. On the role of the body image, cf.
F. Dolto
PERSON
, “Personnologie et image du corps,”
La Psychanalyse, 6 (1961), 59-92
WORK_OF_ART
;
S. A. Shentoub
PERSON
, “Remarques sur la conception du moi et ses references au concept
de l’image
PERSON
corporelle,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
27
CARDINAL
(
1963
DATE
),
271
CARDINAL
-300;
G. Pankow
PERSON
, “Structuration dynamique dans la schizophrenic,” Revue suisse de psychologic,
27
CARDINAL
(
1956
DATE
).
“Come, let yourself be taught something on this one point! . . . look into your own depths, learn
first
ORDINAL
to know yourself!” These words of
Freud
ORG
make us realize this humiliation is itself part of a history of self-consciousness. In te redi—the phrase is
St. Augustine’s
PERSON
; it is
Husserl
PERSON
’s, too, at the end of
the Cartesian Meditations
ORG
; but what is peculiar to
Freud
ORG
is that this instruction, this insight, must involve a “humiliation,” since it has encountered a hitherto masked enemy, which
Freud
ORG
calls the “resistance of narcissism.” This contrariety of narcissism,
as the center of resistance to truth, is what calls forth the
methodological decision to move from a description of consciousness to a
topography of the psychical apparatus. The philosopher must acknowledge
that there is a pro-
found and significant connection between
this appeal to a naturalistic model of the ego and the tactic of
dislodgment and dispossession directed against the illusion of
consciousness, itself rooted in narcissism. The realism of the
unconscious, having become a realism of the ego itself, must be viewed
as a phase in the struggle against the resistances and as a step toward a
self-consciousness less centered on the egoism of the ego, a
self-consciousness taught by the reality principle, by
Ananke
PERSON
, and open to a truth free of “illusion.” Everything we can say, with—and eventually against—
Freud
ORG
, must henceforth bear the mark of this “wounding” of our self-love. In
order to express this point of phenomenological impoverishment to which
we are invited, I would revert to
Plato
ORG
’s remark about being and nonbeing in the
Sophist
NORP
: “The question of being,” he said, “is as perplexing as that of
nonbeing.” Similarly, I say, the question of consciousness is as obscure
as the question of the unconscious.
That is what can be said in
Freud
ORG
’s favor, at the threshold of his theory of agencies. Nor will I hide
the fact that this tactic, perfectly adapted to a struggle against
illusion, prevents psychoanalysis from ever rejoining the primal
affirmation: nothing is more foreign to
Freud
ORG
than the idea of the
Cogito
PERSON
positing itself in an apodictic judgment, irreducible to all the illusions of consciousness. That is why
Freud
ORG
’s theory of the ego is at once very liberating with respect to the
illusions of consciousness and very disappointing in its inability to
give the I of the I think some sort of meaning. But this disappointment,
which is properly philosophical, must
first
ORDINAL
of all be attributed to the “wound” and “humiliation” which psychoanalysis inflicts on our self-love.
Hence, in approaching
Freud
ORG
’s texts on the ego or consciousness, the philosopher must forget the
most basic requirements of his egol-ogy and accept the fact that the
positing of the
1
CARDINAL
think, I am should vacillate. Everything
Freud
ORG
says about consciousness presupposes this forgetfulness and
vacillation. Consciousness or the ego never figures in the
systematization in the sense of an apodictic positing, but rather as an
economic function.
In thus approaching Freudianism through the narrow door of its systematization, we effectively realize the dispossession of con-
sciousness;
we “realize” it, moreover, in the proper sense of the word, for what
this discipline leads to is a realism of agencies. Considered by itself,
however, this realism is unintelligible; the dispossession of
consciousness would be senseless if it merely succeeded in distorting
reflection into the consideration of a thing. Such would be the case if
we overlooked the complex connections linking the topographic-economic
explanation with the actual work of interpretation, which makes
psychoanalysis the deciphering of a hidden meaning in an apparent
meaning.
The
second
ORDINAL
path along which the metapsychology has led us has its origin in the
difficult concept of “psychical representative of instincts.” This
concept, more postulated than demonstrated, and which at times might be
viewed as an expedient, has an irreplaceable function. It constitutes
the main anchorage of the train of reflection. I place it at the point
of return where the movement of the “relinquishing” of immediate
consciousness is seen as the counterpart of the movement of “recapture,”
as the start of a “becoming conscious” which seeks to become equal to
the authentic
Cogito
PERSON
, as the beginning of the reappropriation of meaning.
There is a
point, we said, where the question of force and the question of meaning
coincide: it is the point where instincts are designated in the psychism
by ideas and affects that represent or present the instincts. Leaving
aside the problem of affects (we shall return to it in the next
section), let us consider only those representatives that
Freud
ORG
calls ideational representatives of an instinct.
An instinct, in its biological being,
Freud
ORG
tells us, is unknowable; the only way it can enter into the psychical
field is by means of its ideational representative; thanks to this
psychical sign, the body is “represented in the soul.” Hence it is
possible to use the same language for the unconscious as for the
conscious: we can speak of unconscious ideas and conscious ideas; a
certain unity of intentional meanings henceforth maintains an affinity
of meaning between the systems, in spite of the barrier separating them.
This far-reaching thesis is
two
CARDINAL
-pronged. On the one hand, the psychical cannot be defined by the fact
of being conscious, by apperception; on this point the affinity with the
Leibnizian
NORP
concepts of appetition and perception, which we shall deal with at greater length further on, is very
instructive and renders the
Freudian
NORP
concept of a psychical representative of an instinct highly plausible.
On the other hand, the affinity of meaning between the unconscious and
the conscious implies that the psychical, as such, cannot be defined
apart from the possibility, however distant or difficult it may be, of
becoming conscious. The word “unconscious,” even when replaced by the
abbreviation Ubw (Ucs.), retains a reference to consciousness;
Be-wusstheit, the attribute of “being conscious,”
Freud
ORG
observes, “forms the point of departure for all our investigations”; it
is “the only characteristic of psychical processes that is directly
presented to us,” and consequently it “is in no way suited to serve as a
criterion for the differentiation of systems. . . . Hence consciousness
stands in no simple relation either to the different systems or to
repression.” At most, we can and must “emancipate ourselves from the
importance of the symptom of ‘being conscious.’ ” This is precisely what
we have done in what we have described as the dispossession of
consciousness. But the fact of being conscious can be neither suppressed
nor destroyed. For it is in relation to the possibility of becoming
conscious, in relation to the task of achieving conscious insight, that
the concept of a psychical representative of an instinct becomes
meaningful. Its meaning is this: however remote the primary instinctual
representatives, however distorted their derivatives, they still
appertain to the delimitation of meaning; they can in principle be
translated into terms of the conscious psychism. In short,
psychoanalysis is possible as a return to consciousness because, in a
certain way, the unconscious is homogeneous with consciousness; it is
its relative other, and not the absolute other.
REALITY OF THE ID, IDEALITY
OF MEANING
It
is now possible to again take up in reflection, and more precisely in
its double movement of relinquishing and recapture, the methodological
discussion left in suspense in the
first
ORDINAL
chapter. I will not go back over the status of the
hermeneutic concepts and the topographic-economic concepts
from the viewpoint of their internal consistency and compossibility
within a coherent epistemology. I wish to focus on the mark of “reality”
attaching more particularly to the topographic-economic concepts, and
on the mark of “ideality” of the concepts of meaning, intention, and
motivation.
Freudianism
ORG
aims at being a realism of the unconscious. In this regard,
Freud
ORG
complains that the prejudice of consciousness prevents “philosophers”
from doing justice to the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious. He
is right; but the question remains of determining what kind of realism
we profess and practice when we subordinate the facts of psychoanalysis
to the basic concepts of the metapsychology. This is the task of a
critique, in the
Kantian
NORP
sense of the word; and this task is now capable of being fulfilled.
That
Freud
ORG
’s topography requires a realism of the unconscious is beyond question;
we ourselves have endorsed this realism from the viewpoint of
reflection, recognizing in it the moment of dispossession, of
relinquishing, as contrasted with any premature or illusory achieving of
insight. But this disjunction with respect to my consciousness is not a
disjunction with respect to all consciousness. The relationship of the
metapsychological concepts to the actual work of interpretation implies a
new kind of relativity, no longer to the consciousness which “has,” so
to speak, the unconscious, but to the overall field of consciousness
constituted by the work of interpretation. But this new proposition is
full of snares; for this work and this field pertain to a scientific
consciousness which it is important to distinguish, at least in
principle, from any private subjectivity, including that of the analyst;
this scientific consciousness must
first
ORDINAL
of all be regarded as a transcendental subjectivity, that is to say, as
the locus or home of the rules governing interpretation.
This
realism, which we have “disconnected” from ourselves who philosophize,
which we have separated off from our immediate consciousness, remains in
suspense as long as we have not related the topography to the
hermeneutic field within which every realism is constituted. But this
relationship must be rightly understood, if we do not wish to annul the
gain
Freudian
NORP
realism represents for the
progress of reflection. We did not
regard this realism as a relapse into naturalism, but as a dispossession
of immediate certitude, a withdrawal from and a humiliation of our
narcissism. What we now have to say must not be a covert return of that
same narcissism, but the achieving of a new quality of consciousness.
The dispossession of consciousness has made such an achievement
possible, although
one
CARDINAL
discovers afterward that the hermeneutic consciousness is the condition of the possibility of the topographic realism.
There
is nothing surprising about this situation, nor is it anything like a
vicious circle. It is a situation that in general characterizes the
relation between empirical realism, which is presupposed by every
scientific enterprise, and the critical idealism governing all
epistemological reflection concerning the validity of a science of
facts. Hence a critique of the realist concepts of the topography must
not revert to the investigation of the consciousness of the analyzed
subject, for this would be a step backward in the direction of immediate
consciousness, which we have resolutely turned away from. Of course,
analysis always starts from the puzzles of meaning for this
consciousness, from its symptoms for it, from the dream narrative it
relates to the analyst. That is true, but it is not the crucial factor;
what is crucial is the suspension of that immediate meaning, or rather
that chaos of meaning, and the displacement of the apparent meaning and
its meaninglessness into the field of deciphering constituted by the
analytic work itself. It is the topography that makes this suspension
and displacement possible. Hence the only possible critique of the
realist concepts is an epistemological critique, a critique that
“deduces” them—in the sense of the
Kantian
NORP
transcendental deduction—that is to say, justifies them by their power
of regulating a new domain of objectivity and intelligibility. It seems
to me that a greater familiarity with critical thought would have
obviated many scholastic discussions about the realism of the
unconscious and of the topography—as though one were forced to choose
between a realism of agencies (
UcsPcs
ORG
.,
Cs
PERSON
.) and an idealism of meaning and nonmeaning. In the area of physics,
Kant
PERSON
has taught us to combine an empirical realism with a transcendental
idealism—I say a transcendental idealism, and not a subjective or
psychological one, as would be the case with a too well-
intentioned
theory which would not be long in annulling the result and gain of the
topography. Kant achieved this combination for the sciences of nature;
our task is to accomplish it for psychoanalysis, where theory
constitutively enters into the facts it elaborates.
First
ORDINAL
, empirical realism; this means a number of things:
1
CARDINAL
. The metapsychology is not an optional, adventitious construction; it
is not an ideology, a speculation; it has to do with what
Kant
PERSON
called the determining judgments of experience; it determines the field
of interpretation. Hence we must stop dissociating method and doctrine,
stop taking the method without the doctrine. Here, the doctrine is
method.
2
CARDINAL
. At the end of its process of deciphering, analysis reaches a reality
just as much as do stratigraphy and archeology. The reality that it
encounters, that it finds, surprises us in many ways, and particularly
as the requisite of a terminated analysis. A given dream interpretation
finally runs up against an ultimate core where it stops. This is the
sense in which I understand what
Freud
ORG
says about terminable analysis. At a certain point the analysis
terminates itself, because it ends with these signifiers and not those:
the term at which the analysis ends is the factual existence of this
linguistic sequence and not some other.
3
CARDINAL
. This is a singular, individual reality, with a particular psychical
configuration, but it is a typical reality as well: interpretation is
possible because it regularly comes back to the same signifying
segments, the same correspondences. These recurrences form a kind of
dictionary of preconstituted types; “there is” meaning before “I” speak;
“it” (i.e. the id) speaks. Thus analysis is terminable because certain
singular configurations are discernible; but the singular is
discernible, as this and not that, because it carves its singularity out
of types that limit the range of possible combinations. To the notion
of the terminable must be joined therefore the notion of the finite
order of combinations.
One
CARDINAL
is thus oriented toward the idea of a determined structure which analysis both verifies and presupposes.
4
CARDINAL
. In addition to its grounding in the singularity of meaning and
10
CARDINAL
. “
Analysis Terminable
PERSON
and Interminable,”
GW
PERSON
,
16
DATE
,
59-99
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
23
CARDINAL
,
216
CARDINAL
-53.
in the finite enumeration of typical structures,
Freudian
NORP
realism is based on the mechanistic nature of the laws governing the
unconscious system. The difference between the laws governing that
system and the laws of conscious activity is what justifies in
Freud
ORG
’s eyes the transition from the descriptive point of view to the
systematic point of view. This switch to another legality, in which I
encounter myself as mechanism, is not without analogy with the situation
described by
Hegel
PERSON
in his
Philosophy of Right
WORK_OF_ART
; when the understanding grasps the activity of man as that of a being
of needs, it grasps it within a system that reifies necessity as
mechanism, as external reality;
Hegel
PERSON
states, “Political economy is the science which starts from this view.”
This comparison with political economy is not accidental, for what
fills out the topographical framework is an economy of instincts. The
analytic method is unfeasible unless one adopts the naturalistic point
of view imposed by the economic model and endorses the type of
intelligibility it confers; all the power of discovery stems primarily
from this model. Consequently, a mere linguistic transcription of
analysis seems to me to skirt the basic difficulty proposed by
Freud
ORG
; his naturalism is “well grounded”; and what grounds it is the thing
aspect, the quasi nature aspect, of the forces and mechanisms in
question. If one does not go that far, sooner or later one comes back to
the primacy of immediate consciousness.
But in accepting the
realism, one must also ask the question, What sort of reality? Reality
of what? This is where one must keep very close to what the topography
itself teaches. The reality know-able through the topography is a
reality of the psychical representatives of instincts and not of the
instincts themselves. An empirical realism is not a realism of the
unknowable, but of the knowable; and the knowable, in psychoanalysis, is
not the biological being of instincts, but the psychological being of
the psychical representatives of instincts.
Freud
ORG
says,
An instinct can never become an object of consciousness—
only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious,
moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea.
If the instinct did not attach itself to an
11
CARDINAL
.
Hegel
PERSON
, Philosophy of Right, §
189
CARDINAL
; tr.
T. M. Knox
PERSON
(Oxford,
Clarendon
GPE
,
1942
DATE
), p.
126
CARDINAL
.
idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it.
The realism peculiar to the
Freudian
NORP
topography is
first
ORDINAL
of all, therefore, a realism of the psychical representatives of
instincts; starting from there, the same index of reality is gradually
extended to everything analysis links with ideas; thus an affective
charge (quota of affect) becomes a reality that also has its “place” in
the topography, by reason of the connections we have discovered between
that charge and the ideational representative: “The nucleus of the
Ucs
NORP
. consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their
cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses”; this
connection is what allows one to move from the topographic point of view
to the economic point of view, on the same realist level. “Investments”
(cathexes) and all the other economic operations can be discerned,
recognized, named, only in those ideational representatives and in the
quota of affect that constitutes their quantitative aspect. That is why
Freud
ORG
, in his most realist texts, consistently sets forth the vicissitudes of
instincts as being the vicissitudes of the instinctual representatives:
“Repression is essentially a process affecting ideas on the border
between the systems
Ucs
GPE
. and Pcs. (
Cs
PERSON
.).” It is because this realism is a realism of the instinctual
representatives, and not of the instincts themselves, that it is also a
realism of the knowable and not of the unknowable, the ineffable, the
unfathomable. One must take both of these texts together: the
first
ORDINAL
, in which
Freud
ORG
says, “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology,” and the
second
ORDINAL
, in which he states, “Internal objects are less unknowable than the external world.” It should be noted that the
second
ORDINAL
text is couched in
Kantian
GPE
language; the context in which it occurs states that
Kant
PERSON
corrected our views on external perception and warned us that our
perceptions “must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived
though unknowable.” This is an important remark, for it places the
unknowable outside, on the side of things; so too, the text continues,
15
CARDINAL
. New Introductory Lectures,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
101
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
95
CARDINAL
.
16
CARDINAL
. “The Unconscious,”
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
270
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
171
CARDINAL
.
psychoanalysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of
consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their
object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality
what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that
the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such
great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that
internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. <
292
CARDINAL
>
DATE
<
292
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
That having been said, it remains to relate this “reality” to
the various operations of interpretation and to show that this reality
only exists as a “diagnosed” reality. <
293
CARDINAL
> The reality of the unconscious is not an absolute reality, but is
relative to the operations that give it meaning. This relativity
presents
three degrees
QUANTITY
, which we shall set out in order from the more objective to the more
subjective, or, if you will, from the more epistemological to the more
psychological.
<
293
CARDINAL
> I made use of the notions of diagnostic and diagnosed reality in the
first
ORDINAL
interpretation I proposed of the
Freudian
NORP
unconscious (
Le Volontaire et I’involontaire
ORG
[
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
,
1950
DATE
], pp. 350—84; tr.
Erazim V. Kohak
PERSON
,
Freedom and Nature:
WORK_OF_ART
The
Voluntary
PERSON
and the
Involuntary
ORG
[
Evanston
ORG
,
Northwestern University Press
ORG
,
1966
DATE
], pp.
373
CARDINAL
-409). I return to it here, but with a greater concern for justifying
Freud
ORG
’s realism and naturalism. This interpretation may be confronted with that of
Politzer
GPE
,
Critique
GPE
des fondements de la psychologie,
I. La Psychologic
ORG
et la psychoanalyse (
Rieder
ORG
,
1928
DATE
), and with that of
J.-P. Sartre
ORG
,
L’Etre et le Neant
PRODUCT
(
Paris
GPE
, P. U. F.,
1943
DATE
), “
La
PERSON
psychanalyse existentielle.”
1
CARDINAL
. The unconscious of the
first
ORDINAL
topography is relative to the rules of deciphering which make it
possible, for example, to trace the “derivatives” of the unconscious in
the preconscious system back to their “origin” in the unconscious
system. This relativity must be clearly understood: it does not reduce
itself to a simple projection on the part of the interpreter, in a
common psychological sense; it means that the reality of the topography
constitutes itself within hermeneutics, but in a purely epistemological
sense. It is in the movement of tracing the derivative (Pcs.) back to
its origin (
Ucs
GPE
.) that the concept of the unconscious takes on consistency and its mark
of reality is tested. This is not to suggest that the unconscious
is
real for the consciousness of the subject in question. The reference to
the consciousness which “has” the unconscious must at
first
ORDINAL
be held in suspension and the relationship disconnected. But this
suspension brings to light another relativity, which is not
“subjectivist” but epistemological: the topography itself is relative to
the hermeneutic constellation formed by the various signs, symptoms,
and indications together with the analytic method and the explanatory
models.
2
CARDINAL
. It is in relation to, starting from, and within this
first
ORDINAL
order relativity, which might be called an objective relativity—I mean
the relativity to the rules of analysis and not to the person of the
analyst —that one may speak of a
second
ORDINAL
order, intersubjective relativity. The facts referred to the unconscious by the analytic interpretation are
first
ORDINAL
of all meaningful for another; this witness-consciousness, which is the
analyst’s consciousness, is part of the hermeneutic constellation
within which the topographic reality is constituted. We are not in a
position to spell out the full meaning of these remarks; there is still a
long way to go before this coupling or pairing process can be
thematized. For the present we can only understand its epistemological
significance within the famework of the objective rules governing
analysis. In this context the analyst figures simply as the one who
practices the rules of the game, and not yet as the
second
ORDINAL
party within a dual relationship through which the consciousness of the
one has its truth in the consciousness of the other. The latter meaning
will appear only when the analysand himself is revealed as “becoming
conscious,” as achieving insight, and no longer simply as the object of
analysis whose consciousness was bracketed and rejected as the origin of
meaning. Let us content ourselves with saying that the unconscious—and
in general the reality systematized in the topography—is elaborated as
reality by another person in accordance with the rules of
interpretation. Later we shall point out that this diagnostic
relationship is still very abstract in comparison with the complete and
concrete therapeutic relationship which sets in operation, by means of
the dialogue and struggle between
two
CARDINAL
consciousnesses, the becoming-conscious of a singular being. What we
can say about it at the present stage of our reflection is enough to
make precise the objective status of the affirmations about the uncon-
scious.
It is in relation to the hermeneutic rules and for another person that a
given consciousness “has” an unconscious; but this relation becomes
manifest only in the dispossession of the consciousness which has that
unconscious.
3
CARDINAL
. Finally, it is in the dependence of that double relativity that one can account for a
third
ORDINAL
form of dependence which is now merely subjective, although it is still
constitutive at its own level: what I am referring to is the
constitution of psychoanalytic reality in the transference language. The
singularity of the analyst figures here as an indispensable pole of
reference; a given analyst is the one who provokes, undergoes, and to a
certain extent orients the transference in which the subject matter of
the analysis becomes meaningful. We are bordering here on the contingent
and the unforeseeable; yet it is not a question of an accidental
factor: the transference is not an accidental part of the cure, but its
necessary path. Nonetheless in each case the transference unfolds as a
unique relationship. It is possible to speak of it only insofar as it is
a regulative episode and not an incalculable event. The regulative
episode is an object of training; the transference can be taught and
learned. The incalculable event is the encounter with the singular
personality of the analyst: it is neither taught nor learned. To be sure
the regulative episode is inseparable from the incalculable event: but
it is the
first
ORDINAL
—separated by abstraction from the
second
ORDINAL
—that figures in the hermeneutic constellation to which the psychical “reality” spoken of in analysis is relative.
I
have considered these reflections necessary in order to counteract a
certain form of naive realism. Such a realism would not be an empirical
realism, a realism of the instinctual representatives, but a naive
realism which, after the event, would project into the unconscious the
final meaning as elaborated by a completed analysis. In such a case
psychoanalysis would be a mythology, the worst of all, since it would
consist in making the unconscious think. The expressive force of the
word “id”—even more than that of the term “unconscious”—guards us from
the naive realism of giving the unconscious a consciousness, of
reduplicating consciousness in consciousness. The unconscious is id and
nothing but id.
By directly referring the unconscious, essentially and not acci-
dentally,
to the hermeneutic constellation, we define both the validity and the
limits of any affirmation concerning the reality of the agencies; we
exercise a critique of the psychoanalytic concepts—a critique, that is
to say, a justification of their meaning-content and a limitation of
their pretension to extend beyond the bounds of their constitution.
These bounds are the same ones that enclose the hermeneutic
constellation, that is, the ensemble made up of (
1
CARDINAL
) the rules of interpretation, (
2
CARDINAL
) the intersubjective situation of analysis, and (
3
CARDINAL
) the language of the transference. Outside of this field of constitution the topography is no longer meaningful.
To
sum up, then: reality of the id, ideality of meaning. Reality of the
id, inasmuch as the id gives rise to thought on the part of the exegete.
Ideality of meaning, inasmuch as meaning is such only at the end of the
analysis, a meaning that has been elaborated in the analytic experience
and through the language of the transference.
THE CONCEPT OF ARCHEOLOGY
Thus I understand the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology as an adventure of reflection; the dispossession of
consciousness is its path, because the act of becoming conscious is its
task.
But it is a wounded
Cogito
PERSON
that results from this adventure—a
Cogito
PERSON
that posits itself but does not possess itself; a
Cogito
PERSON
that sees its original truth only in and through the avowal of the inadequacy, illusion, and lying of actual consciousness.
We
must now take a further step and speak no longer merely in negative
terms of the inadequacy of consciousness, but in positive terms of the
emergence or positing of desire through which I am posited, and find
myself already posited. This prior positing of the sum at the heart of
the
Cogito
PERSON
must now be made explicit under the title of an archeology of the subject.
What we must now reexamine in the style of a reflective philosophy is not only the
Freudian
NORP
topography but its economics. We have justified the topographic point
of view by the tactic of dispossession through which reflection counters
the spell of false consciousness. Advancing in the direction of the
central problem of
this meditation, we will try to justify the economic point of view as the discourse appropriate to an archeology of the subject.
Starting with our introduction to the reading of
Freud
GPE
, we tentatively proposed, in anticipation of the present discussion, a
theme we shall now attempt to tie in closely with a philosophy of
reflection. Perhaps, we said, the possibility of moving from force to
language, and also the impossibility of completely recapturing that
force within language, lies in the very emergence of desire.
The
link between that possibility and that impossibility is the present
theme of our reflection. Up to now we have regarded the economic point
of view as a model, that is, a working hypothesis justified by its
epistemological function. But the choice of this economic model remains
external to the movement of reflection as long as the relationship of
this model to reflection is simply the negative relation described as
the dispossession of consciousness. We must now see the underlying
compatibility between the economic model and what I henceforth shall
call the archeological moment of reflection. Here the economic point of
view is no longer simply a model, nor even a point of view: it is a
total view of things and of man in the world of things. Such a radical
transformation of
one
CARDINAL
’s self-understanding cannot be contained in a model or arise from a simple methodological choice. For my part, I regard
Freudianism
ORG
as a revelation of the archaic, a manifestation of the ever prior. Thus
Freud
ORG
’s thought has roots, both old and new, in the romantic philosophy of fife and the unconscious. A review of
Freud
ORG
’s entire theoretical work from the viewpoint of its temporal
implications would show that its main preoccupation is the theme of the
prior, the anterior.
The melodic core of this whole development would be the concept of regression as presented in
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. As we have analyzed this difficult chapter at length, I will not
return to its structure, or to the nature, figurative or realist, of the
schema of the psychical apparatus, or to the connection between the
topography of
1900
DATE
and the theory of the child’s seduction by the father; I move directly
to what seems to me to be the basic aim of this entire construction. The
purpose of the schema, as we pointed out, is to account for the anomaly
of an apparatus that
functions in reverse, in a regressive and not a progressive direction.
Wish
NORP
-fulfillment (
Wunscherfiillung
PERSON
), which dreams consist of, is regressive in
three
CARDINAL
ways: it is a return to the raw material of images, a return to
childhood, and a topographic return toward the perceptual end of the
psychical apparatus instead of a progression toward the motor end.
Freud
ORG
observes that “All these
three
CARDINAL
kinds of regression are, however, one at bottom and occur together as a
rule; for what is older in time is more primitive in form and in
psychical topography lies nearer to the perceptual end.” <
294
CARDINAL
> The topographic regression serves as the pictorial expression of the other
two
CARDINAL
forms of regression, on the one hand the return to images, to scenic
representation, to hallucination, and on the other hand the temporal
regression. Moreover, these last
two
CARDINAL
forms of regression are closely related: “In regression,”
Freud
ORG
says, “the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.” <
295
CARDINAL
> This decomposition, another name for formal regression, the
regression of thoughts to images, is at the service of the return to the
past, for the dream-thoughts, subject to censorship, have no way of
finding expression except in the hallucinatory mode of pictorial
representation: “On this view a dream might be described as a substitute
for an infantile scene modified by being transferred onto a recent
experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival
and has to be content with returning as a dream.” <
296
CARDINAL
> Finally, it is the temporal direction of regression that is most
strongly emphasized: “Dreaming is on the whole an example of regression
to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the
instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression
which were then available to him.” <
297
CARDINAL
>
Expanding
PERSON
this conception,
Freud
ORG
adds that “We can guess how much to the point is
Nietzsche
ORG
’s assertion that in dreams ‘some primeval relic of humanity is at work
which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path’; and we may
expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge
<
294
CARDINAL
>
The Interpretation of Dreams, GW,
WORK_OF_ART
2/3
CARDINAL
,
554
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
(an addition of
1914
DATE
).
<
297
CARDINAL
>
GW
GPE
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
554
CARDINAL
; SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
(these lines were added in
1919
DATE
).
of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him.” That this is ultimately the main emphasis of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
is confirmed by the last lines of the book: “And the value of dreams
for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of
that,”
Freud
ORG
answers categorically; for if dreams lead us into the future, by
picturing our wishes as fulfilled, this future is “moulded by [the
dreamer’s] indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.”
Thus the word “past” is the last word of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
. Underlying this entire discussion is the thesis that no desire, not
even the wish to sleep—of which dreams are nonetheless the guardian—is
efficacious unless it joins itself to the “indestructible” and
“virtually immortal” desires of our unconscious.
Reread from this point of view,
Freud
ORG
’s entire work—both the metapsychology and the theory of culture—takes
on a very definite philosophical tone. I will distinguish between a
restricted concept of archaism, directly deduced from dreams and the
neuroses and thematized in
the “Papers on Metapsychology
WORK_OF_ART
,” and a generalized concept derived analogically from the psychoanalytic theory of culture.
Let us begin within the circle of the restricted archeology.
In
Freudianism
NORP
the sense of depth or profundity lies in the temporal dimension, or
more exactly, in the connection between the time function of
consciousness and the characteristic of timelessness of the unconscious.
We have said that the
first
ORDINAL
function of the topography is to picture schematically the various
degrees of desire all the way to the indestructible. Thus the topography
subserves the economics as the metaphorical picture of the
indestructible as such: “In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an
end, nothing is past or forgotten.” As we have seen, such formulas are
an anticipation of the remarks of the paper “
The Unconscious
WORK_OF_ART
.” In that paper, archaism takes on a sense of depth that is far more
extensive than any energetics of instincts: “The nucleus of the Ucs.
consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their
cathexis.” And
Freud
ORG
continues, “There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by
the
23
PRODUCT
. Ibid.
work of the censorship between the
Ucs
GPE
. and the Pcs.” And for us the most important point of all: “The processes of the system
Ucs
GPE
. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by
the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference
to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system
Cs
PERSON
.” These statements are inseparable from the following ones: “The Ucs.
processes pay just as little regard to reality. They are subject to the
pleasure principle.” All these characteristics are to be taken as a
whole: “exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process . . .
timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality.” 25 It
is difficult not to have the impression that the metapsychology is no
longer simply the working out of a model, but a penetration and plunging
into a depth of existence where
Freud
ORG
rejoins
Schopenhauer
GPE
,
Von Hartmann
PERSON
, and
Nietzsche
ORG
.
It is true that in this text
Freud
ORG
does not seem disposed to give the timelessness of the unconscious a
meaning other than that of a mere temporal priority: “The content of
the Ucs
ORG
." he writes at the end of Section VI of the same paper, “may be
compared with an aboriginal population in the mind. If inherited mental
formations exist in the human being—something analogous to instinct
[In-stinkt] in animals—these constitute the nucleus of
the Ucs
ORG
.”
But as
Freud
ORG
reworks his theory of agencies, the metapsychology of time keeps
extending beyond the framework of a banal evolutionism. What the paper
of
1915
DATE
said about the unconscious is now attributed to the id; it is the id
that is timeless. Now, the term “id,” which was borrowed from
Groddeck
PERSON
(
Das Buch von Es
PERSON
), who in turn was inspired by the example of
Nietzsche
ORG
, has innumerable resonances which cannot possibly be exhausted in a
simple energetics. It is a matter not only of an antiphenomenology, but
of an inverted phenomenology of the impersonal and the neuter, of a
neuter charged with ideas and impulses, of a neuter that, never being an
I think, is something like an It speaks, which expresses itself in
laconisms, displacements of emphasis of meaning, and the rhetoric of
dreams and jokes. Such is the timeless kingdom, the region of the
untimely.
In the New Introductory Lectures Freud does not hesitate to say
that we have only a borderline view of it: “It is the dark,
inaccessible part of our personality; what little we know of it we have
learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of
neurotic symptoms.” <
298
CARDINAL
> “We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.” <
299
CARDINAL
> One would think he is listening to
Plato
PERSON
speak of the
Khora
PERSON
, which the god shapes into the ordered form of the cosmos. In this context
Freud
ORG
again takes up his earlier statements about the timelessness of the unconscious, but with a quasi-metaphysical accent:
<
298
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
15
CARDINAL
,
80
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
73
DATE
.
<
299
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of
time; there is no recognition of the passage of time, and—a thing that
is most remarkable and awaits consideration in philosophical thought—no
alteration in its mental processes is produced by the passage of time.
Wishful impulses which have never passed beyond the id, but impressions,
too, which have been sunk into the id by repression, are virtually
immortal; after the passage of
decades
DATE
they behave as though they had just occurred. They can only be
recognized as belonging to the past, can only lose their importance and
be deprived of their cathexis of energy, when they have been made
conscious by the work of analysis, and it is on this that the
therapeutic effect of analytic treatment rests to no small extent. Again
and again I have had the impression that we have made too little
theoretical use of this fact, established beyond any doubt, of the
unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach
to the most profound discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself
made any progress here. <
300
CARDINAL
>
<
300
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.,
GW
PERSON
,
15
DATE
,
81
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
74
DATE
. On regression and time in
Freud
ORG
, cf.
M. Bonaparte
PERSON
, “L’lnconscient et le temps,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
11 (1939
DATE
),
61-105
CARDINAL
;
J. Rouart
ORG
, “
La Temporalisation
ORG
comme maltrise et comme defense,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
26
CARDINAL
(
1962
DATE
),
382—422
CARDINAL
;
F. Pasche
PERSON
, “Regression, perversion, nevrose (examen critique de la notion de regression),” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
26
CARDINAL
(
1962
DATE
),
161
CARDINAL
-78.
These remarks, let us not forget, are those of an old man who reflects back over the whole of his work and underlines its philo-
sophical
character; hence the numerous references we make to the New
Introductory Lectures in these final chapters. The zeitlos—
timeless—characteristic of the unconscious henceforth belongs to a view
of man in which one can rightly speak of the unsurpassable character of
desire.
Chapter 7 of
LAW
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
was indeed prophetic: the eagle’s gaze had at once detected the
essential point in the bewildering (befremdendes) phenomenon of the
dream-work; the bewildering or strange factor is that the secondary
process is always posterior to the primary process; the primary process
is present from the
first
ORDINAL
, whereas the
secondary
ORDINAL
process makes a belated appearance and is never definitively
established. Regression, of which dreams are the witness and model,
shows that man is unable to completely and definitively effect this
replacement except in the inadequate form of repression; repression is
the ordinary rule or working condition of a psychism condemned to making
a late appearance and to being ever prey to the infantile, the
indestructible. Thereupon the topography receives a
second
ORDINAL
meaning: not only does it picture the degrees of remoteness of the
unconscious thoughts, the distribution of ideas and affects all the way
to the indestructible; its spatiality likewise represents man’s
inability to move from the regulation by pleasure-unpleasure to the
reality principle, or, in terms that are more
Spinozist
NORP
than
Freudian
NORP
(though they are basically equivalent) man’s inability to pass from slavery to beatitude and freedom.
The
climax of this archeology, viewed at the instinctual level, lies in the
theory of narcissism. Narcissism, it would seem, does not exhaust its
philosophical meaning in its role of obstruction and blockage, which
made us call it the false
Cogito
PERSON
.
Narcissism
PERSON
also has a temporal meaning: it is the original form of desire to which one always returns; we recall the texts in which
Freud
ORG
describes it as the “reservoir” of libido; all object-libido is
transformed into it; all de-cathected energy returns to it. Narcissism
is thus the condition of all our affective withdrawals and, as we shall
repeat further on, of sublimation as well. Thus
Freud
ORG
goes so far as to state that object-choice itself bears the indelible
mark of narcissism. All our love-objects, he maintains, are patterned on
two
CARDINAL
archaic objects, the mother who bore us, nursed and cared for us, and our own body;
anaclitic
choice or narcissistic choice, our desire has, so to speak, no other
choice. Narcissism itself, in its primary form, is always hidden behind
its innumerable symptoms (perversion, the schizophrenic’s loss of
interest, the omnipotence of thought on the part of primitives and
children, the withdrawal of the sick person back into his threatened
ego, the withdrawal into sleep, the swelling of the ego in
hypochondria); one has the impression that if it were possible to
pinpoint the nucleus of this
Versagung
PERSON
, this withdrawal of the ego that shuns and refuses the risk of loving,
one would have the key to many fantasy formations in which arises what
might be called an egotistic archaism. But primary narcissism is always
more deeply embedded than all the secondary narcissisms; the latter are
like sedimentations deposited upon an ancient substrate.
It is
now possible to move from the circle of the restricted archeology to
that of the generalized archeology. As we have shown in Part II of the “
Analytic
NORP
,”
Freud
ORG
’s entire theory of culture may be regarded as an analogical extension,
starting from the initial core formed by the interpretation of dreams
and the neuroses. However, as this generalization was the occasion for a
doctrinal renovation, manifested particularly in the
second
ORDINAL
topography, the lines of
Freud
ORG
’s archeology can be followed in the transformations of the theory.
Insofar
as ideals and illusions are the analogues of dreams and neurotic
symptoms, it is evident that any psychoanalytic interpretation of
culture is an archeology. The genius of
Freudianism
ORG
is to have unmasked the strategy of the pleasure principle, the archaic
form of the human, under its rationalizations, its idealizations, its
sublimations. Here the function of analysis is to reduce apparent
novelty by showing that it is actually a revival of the old: substitute
satisfaction, restoration of the lost archaic object, derivatives from
early fantasies—these are but various names to designate the restoration
of the old in the features of the new. It is obviously in the critique
of religion that this archeological character of
Freudianism
NORP
culminates. Under the heading of “the return of the repressed”
Freud
ORG
discerned what might be called an archaism of culture, thus extending
the dream archaism into the sublime reaches of the mind. The later
works,
The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents
ORG
, and
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism, strongly emphasize the regressive tendency of the
history of mankind. Far from becoming less pronounced, the archeological
character of
Freudianism
ORG
has grown progressively stronger.
By no means do I claim that
Freudianism
NORP
reduces itself to this denunciation of cultural archaism; in the next
chapter I hope to show that the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture
contains not only a highly thematized archeology but also an implicit
teleology. But before proposing a more dialectical interpretation of the
structure of
Freudianism
ORG
, we can profitably dwell on this
one
CARDINAL
-sided interpretation which emphasizes the critical rather than the dialectical aspects of the doctrine. As a
first
ORDINAL
approximation, it may be said that
Freudianism
ORG
is a reductive interpretation, an interpretation by way of reductive
equations, the extreme example of which is the famous formula about
religion: religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind. One
should not be in a hurry to correct this reductive hermeneutics but
should rather stay with it, for it will not be suppressed, but retained,
in a more comprehensive hermeneutics (see the last chapter).
The
second
ORDINAL
topography expresses this generalized archeology in its own way by
adding to the archaism of the id another archaism, that of the superego.
Nor do I claim that the notion of the superego reduces itself to an
archeological theme; on the contrary, the theory of identification
expresses the progressive and structuring aspect of that agency. But one
would not understand the difficulties involved in this theory of
identification if
one
CARDINAL
did not keep present in mind the archaic substrate upon which it arises
and the archaizing characteristics of the “father complex,” to use
Freud
ORG
’s terminology again. The father complex has indeed a double valency: on
the one hand it forces one to abandon the position of infancy, and thus
it functions as law; but at the same time it holds any subsequent
formation of ideals within the network of dependence, fear, prevention
of punishment, desire of consolation. It is against the background of
the archaism of a figure irremediably attached to our infancy that we
must overcome, each in his own turn, the archaism of our desire. One
would fail to grasp, therefore, the specificity of the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation of morality if one passed too quickly over these archaic features of the superego.
Freud
ORG
brings this archaism to light when he calls the superego a
“precipitate” of lost objects, and when he states that as such, it
reaches more deeply into the id than does the perceptual system of the
conscious ego. There is a sort of complicity here between
two
CARDINAL
archaisms that gives rise to what
Freud
ORG
calls the internal world, as contrasted with the external world of
which the ego is the representative. Let us group together the
characteristics of this archaism. We recall that on a purely descriptive
plane the conscience of the normal man is approached through a
pathological model; the latter, far from disqualifying the description
of moral phenomena, enables one to reach them from their inauthentic
side. The ego is observed, condemned, mistreated—these are the images or
figures that allowed us to say that
Freud
ORG
adds a pathology of duty to what
Kant
PERSON
called the pathology of desire. The moral man is
first
ORDINAL
of all an alienated man subject to the law of a foreign master, just as
he is subject to the law of desire and the law of reality; the apologue
of the
three
CARDINAL
masters, at the end of The Ego and the Id, is very instructive here.
Thus interpretation has not changed its purpose in moving from the
oneiric to the sublime: interpretation still consists in unmasking; the
superego, because it remains my “other” within myself, must be
deciphered. A foreigner, it remains foreign; interpretation has changed
its object, but not its purpose or aim. In addition to the exploration
of the hidden desires disguised in dreams and their analogues, its
function is to unmask the nonprimal or nonprimitive sources of the ego,
its foreign and alienating sources. This is the positive gain of a
method of exploration that excludes at the start any self-positing of
the self, any primal inferiority, any irreducible core.
The recourse to a genetic explanation confirms and further emphasizes the archaic features of the ethical world. In
Freudian
NORP
-ism genesis takes the place of ground; the internal agency of morality
derives from an internalized external threat. The same emotional core,
that of the
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, lies at the origin of neurosis and culture; each man, and the
whole of mankind viewed as a single man, bears the scar of a prehistory
carefully obliterated by amnesia, a very ancient history of incest and
parricide.
The Oedipus episode symbolizes, of course, the achieving of cul-
ture,
the transition to institutions. But this victory over brute desire
bears the archaic marks of fear; it is a giving-up of the object, but
under the aegis of fear. The primitive scene to which
Totem and Taboo
WORK_OF_ART
assigns the origin of morality is a barbarous history that plunges the sublime into cruelty. From this point on,
Freud
ORG
is fully convinced that our morality preserves the main features that
he finds in taboo, namely the ambivalence of desire and fear,
fascination and terror. The psychopathology of taboo, which relates
taboo to the clinical phenomenon of obsessional neurosis, extends into
the
Kantian
NORP
imperative.
I regard this critique of moral alienation as an
extraordinary contribution to the critique of “existence under the law,”
begun by
St. Paul
PERSON
, continued by
Luther and Kierkegaard
ORG
, and taken up again in a different manner by
Nietzsche
ORG
.
Freud
ORG
’s contribution here consists in his discovery of a fundamental structure of ethical life, namely a
first
ORDINAL
stratum of morality that has the function both of preparing the way for
autonomy and of retarding it, of blocking it off at an archaic stage.
The inner tyrant plays the role of premorality and antimorality. It is
the ethical moment in its dimension of non-creative sedimentation; it is
tradition, so far as tradition founds and obstructs moral invention.
Each of us is brought into his humanity by this agency of the ideal, but
at the same time is drawn back to his own childhood, which is seen as a
situation that can never be surpassed. Later I will speak about the
problems raised by the fact of social institution as such: the quasi-
Hegelian
PERSON
traits which we shall then decipher in the theory of identification
must not make us lose sight of the fact that if institutions are always
the other of desire, it is because of desire and fear that we are from
the outset and for the most part placed in a position of alienating
dependence with respect to that law which St.
Paul
PERSON
said is “holy and good” in itself.
The metapsychology tries to
account for this hidden relationship between the superego and the id.
This metapsychology tries to relate the internalization of a foreign
authority to the differentiation of desire itself. Its problem is this:
How is the sublime brought about within desire? Hence we are not
surprised to see
Freud
ORG
compare in various ways the superego and the id. At times he regards
the process of idealization as a way of retaining the narcissistic per-
fection
of childhood by displacing it onto an idealized self-image (the ideal
ego of the paper “On Narcissism”); thus our better self or ego is, in a
certain way, in line with the false
Cogito
PERSON
, the abortive
Cogito
PERSON
. At times it is in identification itself, the structuring process par excellence, as we shall say further on, that
Freud
ORG
sees a narcissistic component, as in every process of internalization,
through which a lost object prolongs its existence within the ego. At
times he recalls the ancestry of identification, starting from the oral
stage of the libido (in that far-off time when to love was to devour).
An important text in The Ego and the Id expressly ties together, from
the economic point of view, sublimation, identification, and
narcissistic regression.
Thus the Oedipus complex represents both
a severance in desire —the severance figuratively represented by
castration—and the affective continuity between the economics of the law
and that of desire. This continuity is what makes it possible to work
out an economics of the superego:
The derivation of the superego from the
first
ORDINAL
object-cathexes of the id, from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex . . . brings it into relation with the phylogenetic
acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of former
ego-structures which have left their precipitates behind in the id. Thus
the superego is always close to the id and can act as its
representative vis-a-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and
for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is.
All the additions
Freud
ORG
subsequently makes to this economics of the superego, in particular to
account for its severity and cruelty, further emphasize its archaizing
traits. The superego is a precipitate of identification, hence of
abandoned objects, but it is a precipitate that has the remarkable power
of turning back against its own instinctual basis. In order to account
for this reactive character of the superego
Freud
ORG
will emphasize, in
“The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
WORK_OF_ART
,” the role of the fear of castration during the period of the “destruction” of the complex; thus the overcoming of
the Oedipus
PRODUCT
30
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, pp.
223
CARDINAL
-25 and n.
85
CARDINAL
.
31
CARDINAL
.
Cf
ORG
. above, p.
225
CARDINAL
and n.
90
CARDINAL
.
situation, the main task in the accession to culture, is not
at all an escape from the pleasure principle, but is rather its
preservation, since it is in order to save its narcissism that the
child’s ego, under the threat of castration, turns away from the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. Finally, the introduction of the concept of “moral masochism” in “
The Economic Problem of Masochism
WORK_OF_ART
” will make the cruelty of the superego into a representative of the
death instinct, interpreted as the impulse of destruction. This
“mortifying” component, in the proper sense of the term, is the final
element discerned by
Freud
ORG
in the economics of the superego; perhaps it is also the very signature of its archaism.
The
death instinct is not simply one out of many archaic figures, but
rather the archaic index of all the instincts and of the pleasure
principle itself. We should not forget that the death instinct was
introduced to begin with in order to account for a peculiar situation in
therapy—the resistance to being cured, the impulse to repeat the
original traumatic situation instead of raising it to the rank of
memory. The function of repetition is thus seen to be more primitive
than the function of destruction in the death instinct. Or rather,
destruction is one of the ways adopted by a living substance in order to
restore an earlier, inorganic state of things. In this regard the
statements of the New Introductory Lectures are more striking than the
ones we took from
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
. The tendency of life to destroy itself appears so primeval that
Freud
ORG
ventures to write that “masochism [self-destructiveness] is older than
sadism [destruction of the other] ” and that all the instincts aim at
restoring an earlier state of things by provoking a process akin to the
automatism of repetition: embryology is nothing but a compulsion to
repeat. By thus affirming the “conservative nature of the instincts,”
Freud
ORG
places death within life, the return to the inorganic within the very
furtherance of the organic. Thus the hypotheses of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle were not simply “heuristic notions,” but a profound insight
into the nature of things:
If it is true that—at some immeasurably remote time and in a
manner we cannot conceive—life once proceeded out of inor-
32
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
112
CARDINAL
; SE,
22
DATE
,
105
CARDINAL
.
ganic matter, then, according to our presumption, an instinct
must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to
re-establish the inorganic state. If we recognize in this instinct the
self-destructiveness of our hypothesis, we may regard the
self-destructiveness as an expression of a “death instinct” which cannot
fail to be present in every vital process.
It seems to me there
exists a mutual harmony and a close affinity between this theme of
death-dealing repetition, introduced into the theory at
a late date
DATE
, and all the other forms of archaism. Repetition was already a theme during the period of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, when analysis discovered, beneath the disguises of dreams, “our
earliest wishes,” “the indestructibility of desire”; repetition is again
expressed in all the returns, sublime or not, to narcissism; from
Totem and Taboo to Moses and Monotheism
ORG
the theme is repetition: man is drawn backward by an agency that
constantly draws him away from his childhood desires. The process of
tempo-ralization, in which the conscious system ultimately consists,
unfolds in a direction opposite to a timelessness which is instinctual
in nature, or rather, as
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ORG
would put it, in opposition to an impulse that may be correctly
described as detem-poralizing. Such is no doubt the most striking
transcription we can make of that “battle of the giants” which
Freud
ORG
places under the double emblem of
Eros
LOC
and death. If
one
CARDINAL
interrelates all these modalities of archaism, there is formed the
complex figure of a destiny in reverse, a destiny that draws
one
CARDINAL
backward; never before had a doctrine so coherently revealed the disquieting consistency of this complex situation.
ARCHEOLOGY
ORG
AND REFLECTIVE PHILOSOPHY
We have reached the extreme point of self-estrangement in our own archeology by making use, as
Plato
ORG
would say, of a “bastard reasoning” in order to express the other of
oneself within oneself. The philosophical question now arises: Can
33. Ibid.,
GW
PERSON
,
15
CARDINAL
,
114
CARDINAL
; SE,
22
CARDINAL
,
107
CARDINAL
.
we understand this archeology within the framework of a
philosophy of reflection? To ask this question is to raise the question
of the ultimate meaning of the economic point of view.
This
implicit philosophy of our timeless, immortal, indestructible desires
justifies not only the realist traits of the topography, but also the
naturalistic traits of the economics, and ultimately the differentiation
of the economic point of view from the topographic point of view. We
recall the difficulties encountered in interpreting the texts concerning
the separation of the economic from the topographic point of view. We
expressly related this question to that of the peculiar fate or
vicissitude of the affective representatives of an instinct; it is when
that fate no longer coincides with the fate of the ideational
representatives that the economic point of view is truly an addition to
the topographic point of view, as is shown in the paper “Repression” and
in Section III of “The Unconscious.” We followed
Freud
ORG
to the point where the theory of the unconscious seems to swing to the
side of a pure economics, with its complex interplay of cathexis
(investment), withdrawal of cathexis, anti-cathexis, and hypercathexis.
This movement toward the purely instinctual seemed to us to be a
movement toward the presignifying, or even the nonsignifying: “The
nucleus of the
Ucs
GPE
.,” says
Freud
ORG
, “consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their
cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses
[Wunsch-regungen].” And again, “In the
Ucs
GPE
. there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength”;
the “fate [of the unconscious processes] depends only on how strong they
are and on whether they fulfill the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure
regulation.”
We can now understand, in the context of the
archeology of the subject, this problematic of the “affective
representatives” as distinct from that of the “ideational
representatives”; psychoanalysis is the borderline knowledge of that
which, in representation, does not pass into ideas. That which is
represented in affects and which does not pass into ideas is desire qua
desire. The fact that the economic point of view cannot be reduced to a
simple topography shows that the unconscious is not fundamentally
language, but only a drive to-
34
CARDINAL
. “The Unconscious,”
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
286
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
187
CARDINAL
.
ward language. The “quantitative” is the mute, the nonspoken
and the nonspeaking, the unnameable at the root of speech. But in order
to speak this muteness, psychoanalysis has only the energy metaphor of
charge and discharge, and the capitalist metaphor of placement and
investment (cathexis), along with the whole series of their variants.
That which, in the unconscious, is capable of speaking, that which is
able to be represented, refers back to a substrate that cannot be
symbolized: desire as desire. This is the limit the unconscious imposes
upon any linguistic transcription that would claim to be without
remainder.
Now this regressive movement—well deserving the name
of analysis—toward the presignifying and the nonsignifying would itself
be meaningless unless it were coupled with a problematic of the subject;
what this regression designates is precisely the sum of the
Cogito
PERSON
. Just as the “relinquishing” of consiousness in a topography is
intelligible only because of the possibility of a “recapture” in the act
of becoming conscious, so too a pure economics of desire is
intelligible only as the possibility of recognizing the emergence of
desire in the series of its derivatives, in the density and at the
borderline of the signifying.
I will try to bring out the
intelligibility of this function of desire, at the origin of language
and prior to language, by using a comparison taken from the history of
philosophy. The priority of instincts to ideas and the irreducibility of
affects to ideas are related to a problematic which, without being
dominant, is by no means uncommon in the course of our rationalist
tradition. The question is shared by all the philosophers who have tried
to interrelate the modes of knowledge and the modes of desire and
effort. Several great names stand out in this tradition as we look back
in reverse chronological order. Thus
Nietzsche
ORG
tries to root values in the will as points of view or perspectives, and
to treat them as signs either of resentment or of authentic power.
Still more clearly,
Freud
ORG
’s problem is
Schopenhauer
GPE
’s in
The World as Will and Idea
WORK_OF_ART
. But the question has a longer history: it is present in
Spinoza
GPE
, and even more so in
Leibniz
GPE
. Book III of the
Ethics
NORP
coordinates the problematic of ideas with that of effort or endeavor.
Proposition VI: “Everything, insofar as it is, endeavors to persist in
its own being.”
Proposition
WORK_OF_ART
IX: “The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas, and also
insofar as it has confused ideas, endeavors to persist in its being for
an indefinite period, and it is conscious of this endeavor.”
Proposition XI
WORK_OF_ART
: “Whatever increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of
activity in our body, the idea thereof increases or diminishes, helps or
hinders the power of thought in our mind.” Finally, for
Spinoza
PERSON
, the correlation between idea and endeavor is based on the very
definition of the mind (mens) as the necessary perception of the
affections of the body.'
But perhaps the one who most clearly prefigures
Freud
ORG
is
Leibniz
GPE
: the
Leibnizian
NORP
equivalent of the function of
Reprdsentanz
ORG
is the concept of “expression.” It is well known that the monad
expresses the universe and in this sense perceives it. Expression is not
a function solely of monads endowed with reflection, nor even of monads
that have consciousness. Every monad perceives, i.e. every being that
is
one
CARDINAL
per se and not a mere aggregate. In his correspondence with
Arnauld
GPE
,
Leibniz
GPE
states that the function of expression is common to all forms or souls;
expression, therefore, is not defined by a conscious act. More
fundamental than consciousness itself is the power of concentrating a
diversity within a single act that somehow actively mirrors that
diversity.
One
CARDINAL
can even point out the various levels of this power, down to the mineral state. Thus
Leibniz
PERSON
’s philosophy is better able than Descartes’ to incorporate the notion of the unconscious. The Monadology states:
The
passing state which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unity
or simple substance is nothing but what is called perception; it must
be clearly distinguished from apperception or consciousness, as will be
seen later on. In this matter the
Cartesians
NORP
have fallen into a serious error, in that they have treated as nonexistent those perceptions which we do not apperceive. (Art.
14
CARDINAL
)
But there is another aspect of expression: “The action of the internal principle which brings about the change or passage from
one
CARDINAL
perception to another may be called appetition. It is true that appe-
35
CARDINAL
. Ethics, Book II,
Propositions XII
PERSON
,
XVI
ORG
,
XXIII
ORG
.
36
CARDINAL
. Cf. New Essays, Book II,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
9
CARDINAL
.
tite may not always entirely attain the whole perception
toward which it tends, but it always obtains something of it and arrives
at new perceptions” (Art.
15
CARDINAL
). Thus the notion of soul gets its general definition from the
relationship between perception and effort: because of perception, all
effort becomes representative of a multiplicity in a unity; because of
effort, all perception tends toward further distinctness.
Leibniz
PERSON
thus throws light on a double law of representation: as standing for
objects or things, representation is pretension to truth; but it is also
the expression of life, expression of effort or appetite. When the
second
ORDINAL
function interferes with the
first
ORDINAL
there arises the problem of illusion; but distortion (
Entstellung
PERSON
), which served as the title for the various mechanisms of the
dream-work (displacement, condensation, pictorial representation), is
already included in this overall function of expressivity. Thus the
problem posed in the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology of the relation between representation and instincts goes far beyond the case of psychoanalysis.
But if the basic problem raised by
Freud
ORG
’s economic point of view is not completely new, it does retain with respect to
Spinoza
GPE
and
Leibniz
PERSON
an undeniable originality. This originality consists entirely in the
role played by the barrier between the systems. Spinoza and
Leibniz
PERSON
were well aware that effort and ideas, appetition and perception, are
bound together on the hither side of consciousness: the mind in
Spinoza
GPE
is the idea of the body prior to being the idea of itself; and in
Leibniz
GPE
perception can operate without apperception. The
Freudian
NORP
paradox of instinctual representatives, especially in the form of
affects, consists in the fact that the reflective grasp of this bond is
not possible in the direct form of mere conscious awareness; here, the
prereflective is inability to reflect. Thus, to find the
Freudian
NORP
equivalent of that increase of power that for
Spinoza
PERSON
and
Leibniz
PERSON
was the passage from the idea of the body to the idea of the idea or
from perception to apperception, one must look to the whole group of
procedures listed under the heading of the psychoanalytic technique.
This mediating technique does not radically alter the structural
problem. The detour through another consciousness, through work or
“working-through” (
Durcharbei
GPE
-tung), which we have commented on above, does not eliminate the
structural
continuity between the unconscious and consciousness nor between
instinctual representatives and ideas. That is why affects, even when
split off from ideas, are still called instinctual representatives.
Their function of representing the body in the mind gives them a
psychical status. Taking up the theory of affects in our present
reflective language we shall say this: if desire is the un-nameable, it
is turned from the very outset toward language; it wishes to be
expressed; it is in potency to speech. What makes desire the limit
concept at the frontier between the organic and the psychical is the
fact that desire is both the nonspoken and the wish-to-speak, the
unnameable and the potency to speak.
And did not
Leibniz
GPE
say the same thing, in writing on appetition:
. . appetite may
not always entirely attain the whole perception toward which it tends,
but it always obtains something of it and arrives at new perceptions” ?
<
301
CARDINAL
>
<
301
CARDINAL
> Monadology, Art.
15
CARDINAL
. On the meaning of desire, cf.
J. Lacan
PERSON
, “
Le Desir
FAC
et ses interpretations,” Seminaire
1958
DATE
-
59
DATE
,
Bull, de
ORG
psych. (
Jan., 1960
DATE
);
Norman O. Brown
PERSON
,
Life Against Death
WORK_OF_ART
(London,
Routledge
ORG
and
Paul
ORG
,
1959
DATE
);
Herbert Marcuse
PERSON
,
Eros and Civilization
ORG
.
What is an existent that has an archeology? The answer seemed easy prior to
Freud
ORG
: it is a being who was a child before being a man. But we still do not
know what that means. The positing of desire, the unsurpassable
character of life—these are expressions that invite us onward, to a
greater depth.
The
first
ORDINAL
thing to be reexamined is the status of representation in a concrete
anthropology. We proposed placing this status under the laws of a
twofold
CARDINAL
expressivity; representation obeys not only a law of intentionality,
which makes it the expression of some object, but also another law,
which makes it the manifestation of life, of an effort or desire. It is
because of the interference of the latter expressive function that
representation can be distorted. Thus representation may be investigated
in
two
CARDINAL
ways: on the one hand, by a gnose-ology (or criteriology) according to
which representation is viewed as an intentional relation ruled by the
objects that manifest themselves in that intentionality, and on the
other hand by an exegesis of the desires that lie hidden in that
intentionality. Consequently a theory of knowledge is abstract, for it
is constituted by a sort of
reduction of the appetition that governs the passing from
one
CARDINAL
perception to another. Inversely, a reductive hermeneutics, bent on
exploring only the expressions of desire, proceeds from an opposite
reduction, but
one
CARDINAL
that at least has the value of being a protest against the abstract
nature of theory of knowledge and its alleged purity. This reduction of
the act of knowing as such attests to the nonautonomy of knowledge, its
rootedness in existence, the latter being understood as desire and
effort.
Thereby
ORG
is discovered not only the unsurpassable nature of life, but the
interference of desire with intentionality, upon which desire inflicts
an invincible obscurity, an ineluctable partiality.
Thereby
GPE
, finally, is confirmed truth’s character of being a task: truth remains an
Idea
PERSON
, an infinite
Idea
PERSON
, for a being who originates as desire and effort, or, to use
Freud
ORG
’s language, as invincibly narcissistic libido.
I rejoin, moreover, the conclusions of my Philosophy of Will, in The
Voluntary
PERSON
and the Involuntary. In that work I said that character, the
unconscious, life, are figures of the absolute involuntary; they assure
me that my freedom is a “mere human freedom,” that is, a motivated,
incarnate, contingent freedom. I posit myself as already posited in my
desire to be. In such positing, “to will is not to create.” I still
affirm these conclusions
today
DATE
, but I go beyond them in a decisive point, the
one
CARDINAL
that gave rise to the entire research of this book. A hermeneutic
method, coupled with reflection, goes much farther than an eidetic
method I was then practicing. The dependence of the
Cogito
PERSON
on the positing of desire is not directly grasped in immediate
experience, but interpreted by another consciousness in the seemingly
senseless signs offered to interlocution. It is not at all a felt or
perceived dependence, but rather a deciphered dependence, interpreted
through dreams, fantasies, and myths, which constitute somehow the
indirect discourse of that mute darkness. The rootedness of reflection
in life is itself understood in reflective consciousness only in the
form of a hermeneutic truth.
38
CARDINAL
.
Le Volontaire et I'involontaire
ORG
, pp.
453
CARDINAL
ff.; Eng. trans., pp.
482
CARDINAL
ff.
39
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
Chapter 3
LAW
:
Dialectic
NORP
: Archeology and Teleology
Does the philosophical repetition of
Freudianism
ORG
find completion in a philosophy of reflection? To understand
Freudianism
ORG
, is it enough simply to relate it to this philosophy of reflection through the mediating concept of archeology?
The
second
ORDINAL
question is the key to the
first
ORDINAL
. It seems to me that the concept of an archeology of the subject
remains very abstract so long as it has not been set in a relationship
of dialectical opposition to the complementary concept of teleology. In
order to have an arche a subject must have a telos. If I understood this
relationship between archeology and teleology, I would understand a
number of things.
First
ORDINAL
of all I would understand that my notion of reflection is itself
abstract as long as this new dialectic has not been integrated into it.
The subject, we said above, is never the subject
one
CARDINAL
supposes. But if the subject is to attain to its true being, it is not
enough for it to discover the inadequacy of its self-awareness, or even
to discover the power of desire that posits it in existence. The subject
must also discover that the process of “becoming conscious,” through
which it appropriates the meaning of its existence as desire and effort,
does not belong to it, but belongs to the meaning that is formed in it.
The subject must mediate self-consciousness through spirit or mind,
that is, through the figures that give a telos to this “becoming
conscious.” The proposition that there is no archeology of the subject
except in contrast to a teleology leads to a further proposition: there
is no teleology except through the figures of the mind, that is to say,
through a new decentering, a new dispossession, which I call spirit or
mind, just as I used the term “unconscious” to designate the locus of
that other displacement of the origin of meaning back into my past.
If
I understand this connection, at the heart of a philosophy of the
subject, between the subject’s archeology and its teleology, i.e.
between
two
CARDINAL
dispossessions of consciousness, I also understand that the war between the
two
CARDINAL
modes of heremeneutics, which was the main problem of our problematic,
is at the point of being resolved. Seen from the outside, psychoanalysis
appeared to us to be a reductive, demystifying hermeneutics. As such,
it was opposed to a hermeneutics that we described as restorative, as a
recollection of the sacred. We did not see, and we still do not see, the
link between the
two
CARDINAL
contrary modes of interpretation. We are not in a position to go beyond
a mere antithetic, i.e. an opposition whose terms remain external to
one another. The true philosophical basis for understanding the
complementarity of these irreducible and opposed hermeneutics in
relation to the mytho-poetic formations of culture is the dialectic of
archeology and teleology. This resolution of the initial hermeneutic
problem is therefore the horizon of our whole enterprise. However, we
cannot fill out the meaning of such formulas until the present dialectic
itself has been understood and seen as central to the semantics of
desire.
The reader will not fail to stop us at the threshold of
this chapter and object that we are stepping completely outside of a
psychoanalytic problematic.
Freud
ORG
expressly stated that the discipline he founded is not a synthesis but
an analysis—i.e. a process of breaking down into elements and of tracing
back to origins—and that psychoanalysis is not to be completed by a
psychosynthesis. I grant the substance of the analyst’s objection. But
what I am undertaking is altogether different. The present meditation,
even more than our investigation of the concept of archeology, is
philosophical in nature. I said previously that the only way I can
arrive at selfunderstanding in my reading of
Freud
ORG
is to form the notion of an archeology of the subject. I say now that
the only way to understand the notion of archeology is in its
dialectical relationship to a teleology. And so I search in
Freud
ORG
’s work—in analysis as analysis —for the reference to its dialectical
contrary. I hope to show that such a reference actually does exist there
and that analysis is inher-
1
CARDINAL
. “
Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy
ORG
” (
1918
DATE
),
GW
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
185
CARDINAL
; SE,
17
CARDINAL
,
160
CARDINAL
.
Cf
ORG
. above, p.
412
CARDINAL
, n.
88
CARDINAL
.
ently dialectical. Thus, I do not pretend to complete
Freud
ORG
, but to understand him through understanding myself. I venture to think that I advance in this understanding of
Freud
ORG
and myself by revealing the dialectical aspects of both reflection and
Freudianism
ORG
.
What I wish to demonstrate, then, is that if
Freudianism
ORG
is an explicit and thematized archeology, it relates of itself, by the
dialectical nature of its concepts, to an implicit and unthematized
teleology-
DATE
In order to make this relationship between a thematized archeology and
an unthematized teleology intelligible, I will make use of a detour. I
propose the example—or rather the counterexample—of the
Hegelian
PERSON
phenomenology, in which the same problems present themselves in a reverse order. The Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
is an explicit teleology of the achieving of consciousness and as such
contains the model of every teleology of consciousness. But at the same
time this teleology arises on the substrate of life and desire; thus we
may say that
Hegel
PERSON
himself acknowledges the unsurpassable character of life and desire, in
spite of the fact that this unsurpassable is always already surpassed
in spirit and in truth. In using this detour, I do not at all intend to
set
Freud
ORG
within
Hegel
PERSON
and
Hegel
PERSON
within
Freud
ORG
and to mix everything up. The problematics are too different to shuffle
the cards in that way. Moreover, I am too much of the opinion that all
the great philosophies contain the same things, but in a different
order, to entertain the foolish idea of stringing them together in a
facile but absurd eclecticism. My enterprise differs as much as possible
from such an eclecticism.
Hegel
PERSON
and
Freud
ORG
each stand as a separate continent, and between one totality and
another there can only be relations of homology. I will try to express
one of these homologous relations by discovering in
Freudianism
ORG
a certain dialectic of archeology and teleology that is clearly evident in
Hegel
GPE
. The same connection is in
Freud
GPE
, but in a reverse order and proportion. Whereas
Hegel
PERSON
links an explicit teleology of mind or spirit to an implicit archeology of life and desire,
Freud
ORG
links a thematized archeology of the unconscious to an unthematized
teleology of the process of becoming conscious. I do not confuse
Hegel
ORG
with
Freud
ORG
, but I seek to find in
Freud
ORG
an inverted image of
Hegel
GPE
, in order to discern, with the help of this schema, certain dialectical features
which, though obviously operative in analytic practice, have not found in the theory a complete systematic elaboration. <
302
CARDINAL
>
<
302
CARDINAL
> This entire chapter is an internal discussion or debate with
Herbert Marcuse
PERSON
,
Eros and Civilization
ORG
,
J. C. Flugel
PERSON
, Man, Morals and Society; and
Philipp RiefF
PERSON
,
Freud
ORG
, the Mind of the
Moralist
NORP
. It will also confront the views of
Marthe Robert
PERSON
,
La Revolution
EVENT
psychanalytique (
Payot
PERSON
,
1964
DATE
).
A
TELEOLOGICAL
ORG
MODEL
OF consciousness:
THE
HEGELIAN
PERSON
PHENOMENOLOGY
What
Hegel
PERSON
offers for reflection is a phenomenology, not of consciousness, but of
spirit or mind. Let us understand by this a description of the figures,
categories, or symbols that guide the developmental process along the
lines of a progressive synthesis. This indirect method is more fruitful
than a direct developmental psychology; <
303
CARDINAL
> the development of consciousness occurs at the point of juncture of
two
CARDINAL
systems of interpretation. The phenomenology of mind engenders a new
hermeneutics that shifts the center of meaning no less than
psychoanalysis does. The genesis of meaning does not proceed from
consciousness; rather, there dwells in consciousness a movement that
mediates it and raises its certitude to truth. Here too consciousness is
intelligible to itself only if it allows itself to be set off-center.
Spirit
ORG
or
Geist
ORG
is this move-
<
303
CARDINAL
> At
first
ORDINAL
glance, it would seem that the process of becoming conscious is a
simple problem, which we needlessly complicate by loading psychology
down with an unwieldy conceptual apparatus. Certainly consciousness is
not a given but a task—in economic terms, a work or “reworking” of all
the relevant forces. Is not the transition from infancy to adult life
sufficiently accounted for by a psychology of personality, or by what
the various neo-
Freudian
NORP
schools have called ego-analysis? I make no secret of my mistrust of
these corrections that transform psychoanalysis into an eclectic system.
I do not know whether these additions give the analyst more insight;
they certainly mask the theoretical problem, which
Freud
ORG
himself was clearly aware of. A dialectic that derives its clarity from
opposition is always preferable to a patchwork eclecticism based on an
unprincipled empiricism; moreover, these new aspects of psychoanalysis
will perhaps be expressed with greater force if they are regarded as the
dialectical product of the
two
CARDINAL
opposed approaches. Consequently, I will not first look for the meaning
of the psychological process of growth or maturation in a psychology of
personality or an ego-analysis, but in a new kind of phenomenology.
ment,
this dialectic of figures, which makes consciousness into
“selfconsciousness,” into “reason,” and which, with the help of the
circular movement of the dialectic, finally reaffirms immediate
consciousness, but in the light of the complete process of mediation.
The dispossession comes
first
ORDINAL
, the reaffirmation only at the end; what is essential occurs between the
two
CARDINAL
, namely, the whole movement through the constellation of figures:
master and slave, the stoic exile of thought, skeptical indifference,
the unhappy consciousness, the service of the devoted mind, the
observation of nature, the spirit as light, etc. Man becomes adult,
becomes conscious, by assuming these new forms or figures which serially
constitute “spirit” in the
Hegelian
NORP
sense of the term. For example (an unjustified example if taken in
isolation from the total movement), when spirit passes through the
dialectic of master and slave, consciousness enters the process of
self-recognition in another, it is doubled and becomes a self; thus all
the degrees of recognition bring about a movement through regions of
meaning irreducible in principle to mere projections of instinct, to
“illusions.” An exegesis of consciousness would consist in a progression
through all the spheres of meaning that a given consciousness must
encounter and appropriate in order to reflect itself as a self, a human,
adult, conscious self. This process has nothing to do with
introspection; nor is it in any way a “narcissism,” since the home or
center of the self is not the psychological ego, but rather what
Hegel
GPE
calls spirit, i.e. the dialectic of the figures themselves.
Consciousness is simply the internalization of this movement, which must
be recaptured in the objective structures of institutions, monuments,
works of art and culture.
In the next chapter, I will speak of the
present-day
DATE
significance of this
Hegelian
ORG
metapsychology, which I propose to confront with
Freud
ORG
’s in order to understand each through the other. I do not think that we can, after
more than a century
DATE
, restore The Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
as it was written; but it seems to me that we should take as our guide, in any new enterprise of the same style, the
two
CARDINAL
leading themes that characterize a phenomenology of spirit.
The
first
ORDINAL
theme concerns the cast or form of the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic. This dialectic constitutes a progressive synthetic movement,
which contrasts with the analytic character of psychoanalysis and
the “regressive” (in the technical sense of the word) character of its economic interpretation. In the
Hegelian
NORP
phenomenology, each form or figure receives its meaning from the
subsequent one. Thus, the truth of the recognition of the master-slave
relationship is stoicism; but the truth of the stoic position is
skepticism, which views the differences between master and slave as
unessential and annihilates all such distinctions. The truth of a given
moment lies in the subsequent moment; meaning always proceeds
retrogressively. Several consequences are connected with this
first
ORDINAL
rule of reading. It is by reason of this retrogressive movement of the
true that phenomenology is possible. If phenomenology does not create
but only makes meaning explicit as meaning discloses itself, it is
because the later meaning is immanent in each of its anterior moments.
Hence phenomenology can make this later meaning explicit by examining
the prior meaning; the philosopher can pattern himself on what appears,
he can be a phenomenologist. But if he can state what appears, it is
because he sees it in the light of the later forms or figures. This
advance of spirit or mind upon itself constitutes the truth, unknown to
itself, of the anterior figures; this trait characterizes this
phenomenology as a phenomenology of spirit and not of consciousness. For
the same reason, the consciousness thus revealed is by no means the
consciousness that precedes this dialectical movement. In The
Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel
PERSON
uses the word consciousness to denote the mere manifestation of the
being of the world for a witness who is not reflectively aware of self.
Before self-consciousness, consciousness is simply the manifestation of
the world.
This
first
ORDINAL
trait, concerning the form of the
Hegelian
NORP
phenomenology, governs the
second
ORDINAL
, which concerns its content (in
Hegel
GPE
the form of the dialectic cannot be separated from its content, for the dialectic is the self-production of the content). The
second
ORDINAL
trait may be stated as follows. In such a phenomenology it is a question of the production of the self (
Selbst
PERSON
), the self of self-consciousness. When I say that the
first
ORDINAL
trait is the key to the
second
ORDINAL
, I mean that the positing or emergence of the self is inseparable from
its production through a progressive synthesis; hence the self does not
and cannot figure in a topography; it cannot appear among the
vicissitudes of instincts which constitute the theme of the economics.
Let us examine more closely how the self shows itself and appears in The Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
. It should be noted that the self already prefigures itself and moves toward itself within desire—
Begierde
PRODUCT
. On this point,
Hegel
PERSON
and
Freud
ORG
agree: culture is born in the movement of desire. The points of identity may be extended quite far: in both
Hegel
PERSON
and
Freud
ORG
, the abandonment or death of the object plays an essential role in the education of desire. The
Hegelian
NORP
master who has placed his life at stake and recovers it in the form of mastery realizes the movement
Freud
ORG
will describe as the behavior of mourning and the incorporation of the
object within interiority. In this sense there is more than a simple
encounter between the
Freudian
NORP
notion of identification and the
Hegelian
NORP
constitution of the self.
But if the one-to-one correspondences may be multiplied, the direction of the genesis is quite different. We have seen that in
Freud
ORG
’s view any sublimation that brings out new aims, essentially social
aims, must be understood economically as a return from object-libido to
narcissistic libido. In
Hegel
PERSON
’s view, spirit is the truth of life, a truth that is not yet aware of
itself in the emergence of desire, but which becomes self-reflective in
the life process of becoming conscious. “In this process of becoming
conscious,” says
Jean Hyppolite
PERSON
, self-consciousness is “the origin of a truth which is both for-itself
and in-itself, a truth which is constituted in a history through the
mediation of different self-consciousnesses, whose interaction and unity
constitute spirit.” Unruhigkeit, the “restlessness” of life, is not at
first
ORDINAL
defined as drive and impulse, but as noncoincidence with
one
CARDINAL
’s self; this restlessness already contains within itself the negativity
that makes it other and which, in making it to be other, makes it be
self. Negation properly belongs to such restlessness. Thus
Hegel
ORG
can say that life is the self, but in an immediate form—the self in
itself—which only knows itself in reflection where the self is finally
for itself. The light of life, to use the language of St. John, reveals
itself in life and through life, but self-consciousness remains
nonetheless the birthplace of truth and first of all the truth of life.
The
Hegelian
PERSON
philosophy of desire derives all its mean-
4
DATE
.
Getiese
NORP
et structure de la Phenomenologie de VEsprit de Hegel (
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
,
1946
DATE
),
1
CARDINAL
,
144
CARDINAL
.
ing from this recurrent movement of the true, for if one may
say that self-consciousness is desire, it is because desire is already
illuminated by the dialectic of the reduplication of consciousness into
two
CARDINAL
rival consciousnesses. The earlier dialectic of desire has its truth in
the light of the later dialectic of master and slave. Desire is
revealed as human desire only when it is desire for the desire of
another consciousness. The duality of these living self-consciousnesses
foreshadows in an external manner the subsequent duplication of
selfconsciousness within itself; ultimately, “the unhappy consciousness”
will be pure self-division. Thus, there is no intelligibility proper to
desire as such; the light of life arises only when selfconsciousness,
in advance upon itself, posits itself as desire. Starting from simple
consciousness as the manifestation of the otherness of the world,
self-consciousness posits itself as desire and thus takes the pathway of
the return into self. In this movement things are no longer mere
objects, but a disappearing appearance; and in this disappearance,
consciousness with its desires appears to itself. But what is the object
of its desire? What it is seeking, with the help of this withdrawal
from the sensible world—a withdrawal henceforth related to the unity of
self-consciousness with itself—is itself. But it will reach itself only
through its relation with another desire, another self-consciousness. In
commenting on this difficult passage,
Hyppolite
ORG
refers to a “dialectical teleology” : “The dialectical teleology of the
Phenomenology gradually unfolds all the horizons of this desire which
is the essence of self-consciousness.” The desire of self disengages
itself from the desire of things by seeking itself in the other.
Ultimately, such desire is man’s desire to be recognized by man—a desire
made explicit only after it has anticipated itself. This anticipation
enables
Hegel
GPE
to state that “through such reflection into itself the sensible object
has become life”; the reflective mark that distinguishes the object of
desire, as something living, from the mere perceived object cannot be
generated by mere evolution from the earlier to the later. Consequently,
when
Hegel
PERSON
discovers in the otherness of desire the intending toward another
desire, toward another desiring consciousness that is both object
5
DATE
. Ibid., p.
155
CARDINAL
.
6
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
and self-consciousness, he unequivocally states that we
already possess, as philosophers in advance of the movement, the notion
of spirit.
The phenomenology of desire, which we have considered at some length because of its affinities with
Freudian
NORP
theory, is the complete contrary of a genesis of the higher from the
lower; it consists rather in presenting the meaning and conditions of
desire as these appear in the later moments. Desire is desire only if
life manifests itself as another desire; and this certainty in turn has
its truth in the double process of reflection, the reduplication of
selfconsciousness. This reduplication is the condition for the emergence
of self-consciousness in the midst of life. Reflection can be creative,
for each moment includes in its certainty an element of the not-known
that all the later moments mediate and make explicit. That is why
Hegel
PERSON
links the concept of infinitude to this work of mutual recognition: the
concept of self-consciousness, he says, is the concept “of infinitude
realizing itself in and through consciousness.” The opposition in which
each consciousness seeks itself in the other and “does what it does only
so far as the other does the same” <
304
CARDINAL
> is an infinite movement, in the sense that each term goes beyond
its own limits and becomes the other. We recognize here the notion of
Unruhigkeit
ORG
, the restlessness of life, but raised to the reflective degree through
opposition and struggle; it is only in this struggle for recognition
that the self reveals itself as never being simply what it is—and
therefore as being infinite.
<
304
CARDINAL
>
Hegel
GPE
,
La Phenomenologie de Vesprit
PERSON
, tr.
J. Hyppolite
PERSON
(
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
,
1939
DATE
),
1
CARDINAL
,
157
CARDINAL
; tr.
J. Baillie
PERSON
,
The Phenomenology of Mind
WORK_OF_ART
(rev.
2d
CARDINAL
ed.
London
GPE
,
1931
DATE
), p.
230
CARDINAL
.
If the Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
were only a teleology, as might seem to be the case from the present
meditation, and if psychoanalysis were simply an archeology, as the
previous study may have suggested, the
two
CARDINAL
approaches would be antithetical to one another.
Freudian
NORP
psychoanalysis and
Hegelian
NORP
phenomenology would together form what we could call an antithetic of
reflection. (I take “antithetic” in the sense given the term by Kant in
his investigation of the antinomies: viz. a nonmediated opposition, one
that either cannot be, or has not yet been, mediated.) This phase of
thought,
though provisional, is instructive, for the only thing that fully manifests the archeological character of
Freudian
NORP
thought is the contrast with a teleology. The contrast with
Hegel
GPE
reveals in
Freud
ORG
a strange and profound philosophy of fate that is the necessary
counterpart of the phenomenology of spirit aimed at the future absolute
of total discourse. Archaism of the id and archaism of the superego,
archaism of narcissism and archaism of the death instinct form a single
archaism as contrasted with the contrary movement of spirit. The
antithesis may be summed up in the following terms.
Spirit
ORG
has its meaning in later forms or figures; it is a movement that always
destroys its starting point and is secured only at the end. The
unconscious, on the other hand, means that intelligibility always
proceeds from earlier figures, whether this anteriority is understood in
a strictly temporal or in a metaphorical sense. Man is the sole being
at the mercy of childhood; he is a creature constantly dragged backward
by his childhood. Even if we soften the excessively historical character
of this interpretation based on the past, we are still faced with a
symbolic anteriority. If we interpret the unconscious as the realm of
pregiven
CARDINAL
key signifiers, this anteriority of the key sig-nifiers as compared
with all the temporally interpreted events presents us with a more
symbolic notion of anteriority, but it still stands as a counterpole to
the inverse realm of spirit. In general terms, spirit is the realm of
the terminal; the unconscious, the realm of the primordial. To put the
antithesis most concisely, I will say that spirit is history and the
unconscious is fate—the early fate of childhood, the early fate of
symbolisms, pregiven and repeated without end . . .
THE UNSURPASSABLE CHARACTER OF LIFE AND DESIRE
But
we must go beyond this antithetic. The danger is that it will lead to a
facile eclecticism in which phenomenology of spirit and psychoanalysis
would in some vague manner be complementary to one another. The only way
to avoid this caricature of dialectic is to show in each discipline of
thought, considered in and for itself, the presence of its other. These
two
CARDINAL
contrary disciplines are not external opposites but are intrinsically interrelated. What I propose to show is that
Freud
ORG
’s problematic is in
Hegel
GPE
; we shall then be able to see that
Hegel
PERSON
’s problematic is in
Freud
ORG
.
To see
Freud
ORG
’s problematic in
Hegel
GPE
is to see that the emergence or positing of desire is central to the
“spiritual” process of the reduplication of consciousness and that the
satisfaction of desire is inherent in the recognition of
self-consciousnesses.
Let us return to the difficult transition, in
The Phenomenology of Spirit
WORK_OF_ART
, from life and desire to self-consciousness. I do not intend to retract
anything from the interpretation I have already given of this
transition, but to add to it. Can we not find, no longer outside this
dialectic, but in the details of its structure, what I would like to
call the unsurpassable character of life and desire? The teleology of
selfconsciousness does not reveal simply that life is surpassed by
selfconsciousness; it also reveals that life and desire, as initial
positing, primal affirmation, immediate expansion, are forever
unsurpassable. At the very heart of self-consciousness, life is that
obscure density that self-consciousness, in its advance, reveals behind
itself as the source of the very
first
ORDINAL
differentiation of the self.
How does this unsurpassable
character of life manifest itself in the sublation effected by
self-consciousness? The manifestation occurs in several ways and at
several levels of the dialectic of selfconsciousness.
First
ORDINAL
of all it should be said that the dialectic of recognition, which
follows that of desire, is not external to the earlier dialectic but is
rather its unfolding and explicitation. The important concept that joins
the
two
CARDINAL
moments together is the notion of satisfaction or
Befriedigung
GPE
; it plays the part of the
Freudian
NORP
pleasure principle;
Hegel
PERSON
relates it to what he calls the “pure ego.” In the
Hegelian
NORP
text, the pure ego is the naive self-consciousness that thinks it
immediately attains itself in the suppression or sublation of the
object, in the direct consumption of the object:
The simple ego
is this genus, or the bare universal, for which the differences are of
no account; but it is such a genus only by being the negative essence of
the moments which have assumed a defi-
nite and independent
form. Thus self-consciousness is certain of itself only through
sublating this other, which is presented to selfconsciousness as an
independent life; self-consciousness is desire. Convinced of the
nothingness of this other, it affirms this nothingness to be for itself
the truth of this other, negates the independent object, and thereby
acquires the certainty of its own self, as true certainty, a certainty
which it has become aware of in objective form. <
305
CARDINAL
>
<
305
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
152
CARDINAL
; Eng. tr., p.
225
CARDINAL
.
The pure ego says: I exist, for I experience satisfaction, and
in this satisfaction I see the disappearance and dissolution of that
object whose solidity has been assured me by all the physics in the
world.
The fruit is dissolved in enjoyment, says the poet. But it
is here that desire undergoes the tantalizing experience of the
resistance, rebirth, and endless flight of the ripe fruit:
But in
this satisfaction self-consciousness experiences the independence of
the object. Desire and the certainty of self obtained in the
satisfaction of desire, are conditioned by the object; for the
satisfaction comes about through the cancelling of this other. In order
that this cancelling may be effected, there must be this other.
Self-consciousness is thus unable by its negative relation to the object
to abolish it; because of that relation it rather produces it again, as
well as the desire. <
306
CARDINAL
>
<
306
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
Expressed in
Freudian
NORP
terms, the pleasure principle runs up against the reality principle.
Hegel
PERSON
continues thus: “The essence of desire is, in fact, something other than self-consciousness.” <
307
CARDINAL
> In
Freudian
LANGUAGE
language, that which thought it was the pure ego is disclosed as
foreign to itself, as anonymous and neuter, as id. It is at this point
that self-consciousness discovers the other: the independence and the
resistance of the object to desire cannot be overcome and satisfaction
can be obtained only through the favor of an other which is another
person. As the text aptly says, “Self-consciousness attains
<
307
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” Thus the
problem of recognition does not follow upon the problem of desire in an
external and extrinsic manner, but is rather the unfolding of the
egoism of the ego; it is the “mediation” of that which the ego pursued
as satisfaction. I would like to cite
Hegel
PERSON
’s concise text
one
CARDINAL
more time:
It is in these
three
CARDINAL
moments that the notion of self-consciousness first gets completed:
1
CARDINAL
. Its
first
ORDINAL
immediate object is the pure undifferentiated ego.
2
CARDINAL
. But this immediacy is itself absolute mediation; it has its being only
by cancelling the independent object, in other words it is desire. The
satisfaction of desire is indeed the reflection of self-consciousness
into itself, it is the certainty which has become objective truth.
3
CARDINAL
. But the truth of this certainty is really
twofold
CARDINAL
reflection, the reduplication of self-consciousness.
Consequently
the later dialectic will never do anything but mediate this immediacy
given in the process of life, which is the substance constantly negated,
but also constantly retained and reaffirmed. The emergence of the self
will be not outside life but within it.
I find this unsurpassable
positing of life and desire at all the other levels of the dialectic of
the reduplication of self-consciousness. One must not forget that
recognition—the spiritual phenomenon par excellence—is struggle.
Struggle for recognition, certainly, and not a struggle for life, but
recognition through struggle. This struggle means that the terrible
reality of desire is transported into the sphere of spirit in the form
of violence. No doubt the passion to achieve recognition goes beyond the
animal struggle for selfpreservation or domination; the concept of
recognition is preeminently a noneconomic concept: the struggle for
recognition is not a struggle for life; it is a struggle to tear from
the other an avowal, an attestation, a proof that I am an autonomous
self-consciousness. But this struggle for recognition is a struggle in
life against life—by life.
One
CARDINAL
may say that the notions of domination and servitude,
11
CARDINAL
. Ibid., p.
153
CARDINAL
; Eng. tr., p.
226
CARDINAL
.
12
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
which belong to the Hegelian language, are, in
Freudian
LANGUAGE
language, vicissitudes of instincts: domination, because it has run the
risk of death and remains related to life as the enjoyment and
destruction of things through the servile work of the loser of the
struggle; servitude, because it has preferred immediate life to
self-consciousness and has exchanged the fear of death for the security
of slave existence, until work, instituting a new mode of confronting
things and nature, once again gives the advantage to the slave over the
master. Thus it is ever and again life and desire that obtain
positivity—or more emphatically, the positional power—without which
there would be neither master nor slave. It is always life operations
that mark off the dialectic: to risk one’s life, to exchange it—to
attain satisfaction, to work. It is always the moment of nature, the
otherness of life, that, in the proper sense of the word, fosters and
nourishes the oppositions of each consciousness to the other than
itself.
This is the sense in which desire is both surpassed and
unsurpassable. The positing of desire is mediated, not eradicated; it is
not a sphere that we could lay aside, annul, annihilate. The illusion
of the stoic freedom of thought consists precisely in positing the
identity of all reasonable beings in spite of all the differences, in
elevating the identity of the emperor
Marcus Aurelius
PERSON
and the slave
Epictetus
ORG
above the living and historical struggle. This liberation in mere
thought leads back to absolute otherness; the struggling desires no
longer have a self and the self no longer has any flesh; this is the
sense in which life is unsurpassable. And the very term “self”—
Selbst—proclaims that self-identity continues to be carried by this
self-difference, by this ever-recurring otherness residing in life. It
is life that becomes the other, in and through which the self
ceaselessly achieves itself.
THE IMPLICIT TELEOLOGY
of freudianism:
THE OPERATIVE CONCEPTS
EVENT
Let us return to
Freud
ORG
. Psychoanalysis, we said, is an analysis, and there is no possibility
of completing it by a synthesis. This cannot be challenged. I believe I
can
show, however, that this analysis cannot be understood, in
its strictly “regressive” structure, except by contrast with a teleology
of consciousness which does not remain external to analysis but which
analysis intrinsically refers to. What, then, are the traits of this
implicit teleology which we think we see in
Freudian
NORP
thought? Are we not getting involved in an overinterpretation of
Freud
GPE
? I do not deny that these traits are evident only in a reading of
Freud
ORG
coupled with a reading of
Hegel
GPE
. It is for this reason that I have sharply distinguished the successive
moments of my philosophical interpretation: epistemological moment,
reflective moment, dialectical moment. But I hope to show that this
procedure results in a better reading of
Freud
ORG
and a better understanding of myself in reading
Freud
ORG
.
We may approach this implicit teleology through a convergence of
three
CARDINAL
kinds of indications. The
first
ORDINAL
lies in certain operative concepts of
Freudian
NORP
theory, by which I mean concepts that
Freud
ORG
uses but does not thematize. A
second
ORDINAL
indication appears in certain concepts that are highly thematized, such
as the notion of identification, but that remain out of harmony with
the dominant conceptualization of psychoanalysis. Finally, an indirect
indication of the teleology is present in certain problems which, though
clearly belonging to the sphere of competence of psychoanalysis, remain
unresolved, such as the problem of sublimation. It has seemed to me
that such problems would find, if not a solution, at least a better
formulation in a dialectical perspective.
Every theory contains
concepts that are employed but not reflected upon in the theory itself.
The elimination of such concepts would bring about a state of total
reflection or absolute knowledge, which is incompatible with the
finitude of knowledge. Hence it is no criticism of psychoanalysis to
find in it operative concepts that, in order to be thematized, would
require a conceptual framework different from that of its topography and
economics.
These operative concepts, which enabled us to
distinguish psychoanalysis from scientific psychology and phenomenology,
are rooted in the very structure of the “psychoanalytic field,” in the
sense of a dual relationship of interlocution. Whereas the
metapsychology thematizes an isolated psychical apparatus, or, as we
have
at times put it, whereas the
Freudian
NORP
topography is solipsistic, the analytic situation is directly
intersubjective. The analytic situation does not bear merely a vague
resemblance to the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic of reduplicated consciousness; between that dialectic and the
process of consciousness that develops in the analytic relation there
is a remarkable structural homology. The entire analytic relation can be
reinterpreted as a dialectic of consciousness, rising from life to
self-consciousness, from the satisfaction of desire to the recognition
of the other consciousness. As the decisive episode of the transference
teaches us, insight or the process of becoming conscious not only
entails another consciousness, the analyst’s, but contains a phase of
struggle reminiscent of the struggle for recognition. The process is an
unequal relation in which the patient, like the slave or bondsman of the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic, sees the other consciousness by turns as the essential and
as the unessential; the patient likewise has his truth at
first
ORDINAL
in the other, before becoming the master through a work comparable to the work of the slave, the work of the analysis.
One
CARDINAL
of the signs that the analysis is ended is precisely the attainment of the equality of the
two
CARDINAL
consciousnesses, when the truth in the analyst has become the truth of
the sick consciousness. Then the patient is no longer alienated, no
longer another: he has become a self, he has become himself.
Furthermore, what occurs in the therapeutic relationship, which is a
type of struggle between
two
CARDINAL
consciousnesses, should lead us to something even more important: the
transference—in the course of which the patient repeats, in the
artificial situation of analysis, important and meaningful episodes of
his affective life—assures us that the therapeutic relation acts as a
mirror image in reviving a whole series of situations all of which were
already intersubjective. A desire or wish, in the
Freudian
NORP
sense, is never a mere vital impulse, for it is from the very beginning
set within an intersubjective situation. Hence we can say that all the
dramas psychoanalysis discovers are located on the path that leads from
“satisfaction” to “recognition.” The child’s desire involves his mother,
then he discovers that his desire for his mother involves his father;
therein lies the essence of the Oedipus conflict. The same may be said
about the Oedipus conflict that
Hegel
PERSON
said about the failure of the immediacy of desire: “but in this satisfaction, self-
consciousness
experiences the independence of the object.” At this point the parallel
between hunger and love is at an end: hunger has its object in things,
love has its object in another desire. Thus all the phases of the libido
are phases of the reduplication of selfconsciousness. Moreover, as was
intimated by the therapeutic relation itself, in each case such phases
are situations in which the division of consciousnesses is not
egalitarian. The child’s consciousness
first
ORDINAL
has its truth in the father figure, which is the child’s
first
ORDINAL
model or ideal; like the slave or bondsman, the child has traded—by a pact no less
Active
LOC
than the one binding the slave to his master— his security for
dependence. But such dependence is the means of achieving independence.
How far is it possible to extend this rereading of
Freud
ORG
in the light of operative concepts homologous with those of
Hegel
GPE
’s phenomenology?
A reader familiar with the philosophical
mentality of Hegelianism cannot help noticing the constant use of
opposition in the structure of
Freud
ORG
’s concepts. The
three
CARDINAL
successive theories of instinct are dichotomous ones: sexual (or
libido) instincts versus ego-instincts; object-libido versus ego-libido;
life instincts versus death instincts. It is true that a dichotomy is
not necessarily a dialectic, and that in each instance the dichotomy has
a different sense. But this style of opposition is intimately involved
in the birth of meaning; the dichotomy is already dialectical.
In the case of the vicissitudes of instincts we have an obvious dialectical structure.
Freud
ORG
combines these vicissitudes into meaningful pairs: voyeurism and
exhibitionism, sadism and masochism. These “reversals” and processes of
“turning round” entail both a dynamics of desire and a dynamics of
meaning, for it is in these vicissitudes that the subject and object are
constituted in polar opposi-
13
LAW
. The discussion concerning the object-relation should be placed in this dialectical field.
Cf
PERSON
.
M. Bouvet
PERSON
, “Le moi dans la nevrose obsessionnelle. Relation d’objet et mecanisme de defense,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
17
CARDINAL
(
1953
DATE
),
111—96
CARDINAL
; “
La
PERSON
clinique psychanalytique. La relation
d’objet
GPE
,”
La Psychanalyse
NORP
d’aujourd’hui,
1
CARDINAL
,
41-121
CARDINAL
; “
Depersonnalisation
PRODUCT
et relation
d’objet
GPE
,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
24
CARDINAL
(
1960
DATE
),
449
CARDINAL
-611.
G. Grunberger
PERSON
, “
Considerations sur l’oralite et la relation d’objet
WORK_OF_ART
orale,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
23
CARDINAL
(
1959
DATE
),
177204
DATE
; “
Etude
PERSON
sur la relation objectale anale,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
24
CARDINAL
(
1960
DATE
),
137
CARDINAL
-68.
tion. We may go even further and interpret the topography
itself as a dialectic of “systems.” What is important here is the
communication or relations between the systems; and what are these
relations but a further dialectic of instincts? Indeed,
Freud
ORG
explicitly links the constitution of the systems to one of the
instinctual vicissitudes, repression. So primal is the conflictual
relation that
Freud
ORG
appeals to the notion of primal repression (
Urverdrdngung
GPE
) as the basis for all later repressions or repression proper.
Repression proper presupposes that something has already been repressed;
this means that one does not know of any psychical apparatus
functioning in a purely nonrepressive manner. In another terminology,
the dialectic between the primary system and the
secondary
ORDINAL
system is itself primordial. This primordial aspect of repression is
nothing other than the structure of desire insofar as desire is from the
very beginning confronted by another desire.
Thus this
dialectical structure is to be seen in the topography itself. The
topography, as we know, arises from a simple opposition between the
conscious and the unconscious; we may say that the topography is the
spatial picture of a basically dialectical relationship. The
Freudian
NORP
systematization objectivizes in a solipsistic apparatus relations that
owe their origin to intersubjective situations and the process of the
reduplication of consciousness. Consequently, even within the topography
itself, as an intrapsychical relation,
one
CARDINAL
finds relations that figuratively represent the original intersubjectivity.
I
wonder whether we must not also reconsider what seemed to us quite
settled in the framework of the metapsychology, namely, the strictly
nondialectical characteristics of the unconscious, or rather, to use the
expression adopted after
1914
DATE
, of the id. What I mean here by a nondialectical characterization is the famous description of that locality, called
first
ORDINAL
the unconscious and then the id, as a purely affirmative power, exempt
from negation, time sequence, and the discipline of reality, and blindly
aiming at pleasure. This absolute desire—absolute in the sense of
having no relations—has outside of itself, in another locality, the
origin of the negation of time and the relation to reality. That this
theory is simply an abstract, though necessary, step in the progress of
understanding may be seen
from the fact that desire is in an
intersubjective situation from the very start. It is desire confronted
with the mother and the father, it is desire confronted with desire; as
such, it has entered into the process of negativity, the process of
self-consciousness, from the outset.
The
second
ORDINAL
topography presents an even more graphic picture of a dialectic. The
first
ORDINAL
topography had to do with intrapsychical localities; the
second
ORDINAL
topography has to do with roles, the roles of a per-sonology in which
the impersonal, the personal, and the superpersonal confront one
another. The
second
ORDINAL
topography is the dialectic properly so-called in and through which
arise the various instinctual dichotomies and the opposed pairs of
instinctual vicissitudes mentioned above. The question of the superego
lies at the origin of the dialectical situation that made the
first
ORDINAL
topography possible, for this question is at the origin of the
intrapsychical conflicts. Desire has its other. Consequently the
second
ORDINAL
topography is more than just a revision of the
first
ORDINAL
topography; it arises from a confrontation of the libido with a
nonlibidinal factor that manifests itself as culture. At this point, the
economics of instincts is simply the shadow, projected onto the plane
of solipsistic cathexes, of the dialectic of roles. That is why the
dependent relationships of the ego, to revert to the title of
Chapter 5 of The Ego
LAW
and the Id, are more directly dialectical than the topological
relationships of the earlier representation of the psychical apparatus.
Furthermore, the series of pairs, ego-id, ego-superego, ego-world, which
constitute these dependent relations, are all presented, as in the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic, as master-slave relationships that must be overcome.
THE IMPLICIT TELEOLOGY
of freudianism:
IDENTIFICATION
PERSON
There is a
second
ORDINAL
way in which the genesis of the superego in
Freudian
NORP
theory relates to an unthe-matized teleological dialectic. It relates
to it not only by reason of the operative concepts used in the
construction of the successive topographies, but also by reason of a
fundamental and highly elaborated concept which, not finding a suitable
conceptual basis in the
topographic and economic point of view,
remains peripheral to the theory. I refer to the concept of
identification, whose gradual formation we have followed in
Freud
ORG
’s work.
Identification
NORP
, it seems to me, is a concept that remains unharmonized with the metapsychology.
In
Freudian
NORP
theory the external fact par excellence is authority.
Authority
ORG
is not contained in the proper nature of the libido which seeks
satisfaction. It is by means of prohibitions that authority penetrates
into the instinctual field and inflicts upon the instincts a specific
wound of which the threat of castration is the
half
CARDINAL
-real,
half-fictive expression
QUANTITY
. How then is the encounter between desire and its other to be accounted
for on the economic balance sheet as an expenditure of pleasure and
unpleasure? The metapsychology states this problem in the following
terms. If all instinctual energy derives from the id, how can this
instinctual substrate “differentiate” itself, i.e. give a different
distribution of its cathexes, according to the various prohibitions? The
entrance of authority into the history of desire, this acquired
differentiation of desire, gives rise to a special type of semantics,
that of ideals. I do not mean to return here to the problems of
deciphering and interpreting that this new semantics raises; we have
already dealt with those problems under the heading of the oneiric and
the sublime. Our present interest concerns rather the conceptual
structure in which this differentiation may be adequately represented.
My thesis is that this differentiation forms a dialectic homologous to the
Hegelian
NORP
process of the reduplication of consciousness; but this entrance of the
other’s consciousness into one’s self is not completely accounted for
in the economics one tries to translate it into. The consciousness that
has another consciousness as its paired opposite cannot be treated as an
agency in a topography: just as the metapsychology does not
theoretically elaborate the analytic relation qua intersubjective drama,
neither does it theoretically elaborate the adventure of desire as soon
as the desire-pleasure relationship entails the desire-desire
relationship. This desire-desire relationship places the libido in the
field of a phenomenology of spirit; thus we must speak of this desire of
desire in
Hegelian
NORP
terms: “self-
consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”
Freud
ORG
’s puzzlement concerning the concept of identification is the exact
expression of this situation. As we have said, identification is more of
a problem than a solution. Ultimately, there are
two
CARDINAL
identifications, as we learned from
Chapter 7 of Group Psychology
LAW
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego. The one that puzzles us is the identification that precedes the
Oedipus
LOC
complex and is strengthened by the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. According to this primary identification, the father
represents what the child would like to be and have; he is a model to be
imitated. The
Oedipus
LOC
complex results from the confluence of this identification and the
child’s attachment to his mother as a sexual object. The attachment to a
being as the model of “what one would like to be” is therefore
irreducible to the desire to have; desire to be like and desire to have
will come together and intertwine, but they remain
two
CARDINAL
distinct processes. It seems to me the situation might be described
rather accurately by saying that psychoanalysis constantly presupposes
the intersubjective process of the duplication of consciousness but that
the metapsychology, unable to account for that process in its original
essence, theoretically elaborates only its side effects on the
instinctual plane. In the rest of the same text, it is the regressive
aspects of identification that are constantly mentioned and interpreted
economically; in examining the case of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex on the part of a little girl in a neurotic context,
Freud
ORG
observes “that identification has appeared instead of object-choice,
and that object-choice has regressed to identification.” Similar terms
are used when he speaks of the male homosexual’s identification with his
mother; because of this identification the young man looks about for
sexual objects that can replace his own body, and on which he can bestow
such love and care as he experienced from his mother. In this striking
case of identification, the regressive character of the replacement of
the abandoned or lost object, as well as the regressive character of the
introjection of the object into
14
CARDINAL
.
Group Psychology
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
13
CARDINAL
,
116
CARDINAL
-21; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
106
CARDINAL
-10. Cf. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
2
CARDINAL
, pp.
216
CARDINAL
-21.
the ego, is highly evident. The same remark would apply in
the case of melancholia and its characteristic introjection of the
object. I would say that what psychoanalysis recognizes under the name
of identification is simply the shadow, projected onto the plane of an
economics of instincts, of a process of consciousness to consciousness,
and that this process has to be understood through another type of
interpretation.
Although psychoanalysis grasps only the affective
projection of this process, it transforms our understanding of the
process by providing us with a completely new frontier view. The energy
made available by the dissolution of the object-libido, and hence by the
regression of that libido, is what enables us to progress toward
affectionate trends of feeling and to invest our emotions in cultural
objects. The economics grasps only the reverse side of the phenomenon it
calls the introjection or installation of the lost object in the ego.
The shadow of the process of consciousness to consciousness, as
projected onto the economic plane, is always some kind of regression;
the “replacement of an object-cathexis by an identification” is the only
method by which an erotic object-choice can become an alteration of the
ego, or, as The Ego and the Id says, it is a method of obtaining
control over the id. Since a detailed exegesis of these texts has
already been made, I do not intend to reexamine them here. But I do
propose once more to cite the New Introductory Lectures, which represent
Freud
ORG
’s penultimate reflection on his work; nowhere else does he so clearly
express the discrepancy between an economics of desire and a factor that
is no longer subject to an instinctual economics. Nowhere else is it so
clearly evident that in an economics identification is understood
solely as a type of regression, whereas qua founding process it eludes
the economics: “If one has lost an object or has been obliged to give it
up, one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it and by
set-
15
CARDINAL
. Above, pp.
221
CARDINAL
-26.
One
CARDINAL
should consider here the important work of
Erik H. Erikson
PERSON
:
Childhood
ORG
and
Society
ORG
(
1950
DATE
),
Young Man Luther
PERSON
(
1958
DATE
),
Identity and the Life Cycle
ORG
(
1960
DATE
),
Insight
ORG
and Responsibility (
1964
DATE
). This work may be compared with
J. Laplanche
PERSON
, Holderlin et la question du pere (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
PERSON
,
1961
DATE
), and with
A. Vergote
PERSON
,
La Psy-chanalyse
PERSON
, science
de I’homme
PERSON
(
Dessart
GPE
,
1964
DATE
), Part III, “
Psychanalyse
NORP
et anthropologie philosophique.”
ting it up once more in one’s ego, so that here object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification.” <
308
CARDINAL
> That something essential has not been accounted for, at the very
moment identification is recognized in its vast dimension, is evidenced
by the following admission: “I myself am far from satisfied with these
remarks on identification; but it will be enough if you can grant me
that the installation of the superego can be described as a successful
instance of identification with the parental agency.” <
309
CARDINAL
>
<
308
CARDINAL
>
New Introductory Lectures
GPE
,
GW
PERSON
,
15
CARDINAL
,
69
CARDINAL
; SE,
22
DATE
,
63
DATE
.
<
309
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
This text invites us to place the structure of the
Hegelian
PERSON
selfconsciousness at the very center of the
Freudian
NORP
desire. The point drawing us onward here is the famous “object-loss,”
so often treated in the same context as identification and, it seems,
always in the perspective of regression, as in “
Mourning and Melancholia
WORK_OF_ART
.” But is the loss of the object always and fundamentally a regressive
process, a return to narcissism? Does it not indicate, on the contrary,
an educative transformation of human desire, a transformation related to
the process of reduplication of consciousness not in an accidental but
in a fundamental and founding manner? What seems to oppose an
interpretation that would place the dialectic of self-consciousness at
the very heart of desire is
Freud
ORG
’s definition of the libido. <
310
CARDINAL
> This definition seems to be carefully divorced from the whole
process of the reduplication of consciousness by reason of the
systematic apparatus of the topography. But desire, as we said above, is
from the outset in an intersubjective situation; hence the process of
identification is not something added on from without but is rather the
dialectic of desire itself. Such a remark brings out the profound
meaning of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, in the sense of a “successful” identification, to use an
expression mentioned above. Everything is not accounted for in a purely
regressive conception of the abandonment of the object. When we say that
the superego is the heir of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, we refer to something much broader than what is meant by an
economics of the withdrawal of cathexis: the child’s “abandonment” of
the
Oedipus
LOC
complex, his “renunciation of the intense object-cathexes which he has deposited
ORG
<
310
CARDINAL
>
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
, 118—20;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
, 217—19.
with his parents,” are simply ways of designating, in
terms of the withdrawal of cathexis, the economic impact of a creative
process, viz. the progress of identification and the setting up of a
structure.
Freud
ORG
is not far from recognizing that such is the case:
It is as a
compensation for this loss of objects that there is such a strong
intensification of the identifications with his parents which have
probably long been present in his ego. Identifications of this kind as
precipitates of object-cathexes that have been given up will be repeated
often enough later in the child’s life; but it is entirely in
accordance with the emotional importance of this
first
ORDINAL
instance of such a transformation [Umsetzung] that a special place in the ego should be found for its outcome.
This
text is of great importance for understanding the close connection
between loss of the object—the renunciation of libidinal cathexis, which
is a vicissitude of the libido—and identification, which pertains to
the dialectic of the reduplication of consciousness. As in
Hegel
GPE
, the search for satisfaction undergoes the experience of the negative
as soon as that search enters the field of identification, which we have
recognized as being homologous with the reduplication of
self-consciousness. The fact that desire becomes dialectical is
therefore no longer an external vicissitude, as was the case in the
texts of
the “Metapsychology”
WORK_OF_ART
which posited an absolute desire, exempt from negation, and assigned
the function of negation to the censorship. The censorship escapes the
mythology of the watchman or guardian and takes its place in the
dialectic of identification. On
at least one
CARDINAL
occasion, in his admirable description of the work of mourning,
Freud
ORG
recognized that the experience of the negative is internal and no
longer external to desire itself. I will not go back over these texts,
which we have cited and analyzed at length. Do we not find in them the
beginning of a genuine dialectic of desire, in which negation is placed
at the very center of desire? Are we not invited thereby to reinterpret
the death instinct and relate it to the negativity through which desire
is educated and humanized? Is there not a profound unity between the
death instinct, the mourning of desire, and the transition to symbols?
19
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
70
DATE
;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
64
CARDINAL
.
The possibility is thus opened of rereading
Freud
ORG
’s writings from the standpoint of the reduplication of consciousness.
The rule of this rereading would be the oscillation between a dialectic
and an economics, between a dialectic oriented toward the gradual
emergence of self-consciousness and an economics that explains the
“placements” and “displacements” of desire through which this difficult
emergence is effected. I admit that this dialectic of consciousness to
consciousness, which operates through identification and has
repercussions in the depths of desire in the form of the loss of the
object, is not the dominant theme of psychoanalysis. I would say rather
that this dialectic has imposed itself upon psychoanalysis in opposition
to its metapsychology, its topography, and its economics, i.e. in
opposition to the express model that it adopts in order to understand
itself and develop its own theory. In an economics the struggle between
consciousnesses is not recognized as a dialectic of the self, but only
as a vicissitude external to instincts that are moved by the pleasure
principle. That is why the economics is at bottom solipsistic. But
neither psychoanalysis as therapy nor any of the situations it reflects
upon is solipsistic. It is therefore in opposition to the economics that
psychoanalysis integrates into itself the
Hegelian
NORP
history of desire wherein satisfaction is attained only through another
history, that of recognition. Thus the rereading I have just alluded to
is in a certain sense itself in opposition to the
Freudian
NORP
economics.
THE IMPLICIT TELEOLOGY
of freudianism:
THE QUESTION OF SUBLIMATION
If
Freud
ORG
’s theory presents a concept of identification, it presents only a
question regarding sublimation. The entire preceding problematic is
mirrored in this unresolved question. Connected with it are all the
other unresolved questions concerning the origin of the ethical sphere,
so far as they are not dealt with by the concept of identification.
It will be noticed that our “
Analytic
NORP
” does not present a separate study of sublimation. This is not accidental: in
Freud
ORG
’s written
work the notion of sublimation is both fundamental
and episodic. It is announced as one of the instinctual vicissitudes,
distinct not only from the reversal (
Verkehrung
PERSON
) of instincts into their contrary and from turning round (
Wendung
GPE
) upon the subject, but also and especially from repression. Yet
Freud
ORG
has left us no complete and separate work dealing with this original vicissitude. Furthermore, as one of
Freud
ORG
’s critics has shown, <
311
CARDINAL
> the rough sketch of a theory found in
the Three Essays
ORG
will not be changed appreciably after
1905
DATE
, except for correlations with desexualization and identification. It is
worthwhile, therefore, to examine in detail the text of
1905
DATE
.
<
311
CARDINAL
>
Harry B. Levey
PERSON
, “
A Critique of the Theory of Sublimation
WORK_OF_ART
,” Psychiatry (
1939
DATE
), pp.
239-70
CARDINAL
.
The
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
treat of sublimation in
four
CARDINAL
separate episodes. The
first
ORDINAL
allusion occurs in the
first
ORDINAL
essay (
“Sexual Aberrations”
WORK_OF_ART
) under the heading of “deviations in respect of the sexual aim” and the
subheading of “preliminary sexual aims.” This location of sublimation
is significant.
Sublimation
PERSON
is a deviation with respect to the aim of the libido and not a
substitution of an object. This deviation is connected with the
“preparatory activities” that precede the normal sexual act; more
precisely, it is connected with the sensual pleasure resulting from the
preparatory acts of touching, seeing, concealing, revealing; such acts
can become separate aims that take place of the normal one. This
deviation places sublimation in the field of the esthetic, i.e. of
cultural phenomena: “[This sexual curiosity] can, however, be diverted
(‘sublimated’) in the direction of art, if its interest can be shifted
away from the genitals onto the shape of the body as a whole.” <
312
CARDINAL
> By the same token, this lingering over “the intermediate sexual aim
of looking” places sublimation in the field of perversion, for
perversion too is a lingering and a deviation along the pathway to the
normal sexual act. In this
first
ORDINAL
text, the contrast with perversion is attributed to counterforces
(shame and disgust) but no distinction is drawn between sublimation and
repression.
<
312
CARDINAL
>
Three
CARDINAL
Essays on Sexuality
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
55—56
CARDINAL
;
SE
PERSON
,
7
CARDINAL
,
156
CARDINAL
-57.
The
second
ORDINAL
context is that of the
second
ORDINAL
essay, which is devoted to infantile sexuality; thus it is a genetic context. The beginning of
sublimation
is connected with the latency period. More clearly than in the
preceding text, sublimation is regarded from the viewpoint of the
attaining of culture. As for its mechanism,
Freud
ORG
connects it with the role of “mental dams,” which he lists as “disgust,
shame and morality.” These opposing forces run directly counter to the
perverse impulses of infantile sexuality, which is related to the
erotogenic zones of the body. The opposing forces, or reacting impulses,
are evoked to suppress a certain kind of unpleasure that arises because
of the individual’s subsequent development. Thus in this
second
ORDINAL
text sublimation is linked once again to the erotogenic zones and
perversion, as well as to the deviation from the aim because of the
activity of counterforces, but still no distinction is drawn between
sublimation and repression.
The
third
ORDINAL
allusion is found at the very end of the same essay, in the section on
the sources of infantile sexuality. The characteristic deviation of
sublimation is compared to the “transfer” or “attraction” that is
observed when a sexual function encroaches on another function by reason
of their common possession of an erotogenic zone (
Freud
ORG
cites the example of the labial zone: the disturbance of the erotogenic functions of this common zone may result in anorexia):
The
same pathways . . . must serve as paths for the attraction of sexual
instinctual forces to aims that are other than sexual, that is to say,
for the sublimation of sexuality. But we must end with a confession that
very little is as yet known with certainty of these pathways, though
they certainly exist and can probably be traversed in both directions.
Thus
the factor of inhibition accompanying this deviation from the aim
receives less emphasis in this text than in the earlier ones. However,
Freud
ORG
’s insistence on linking the problem of sublimation to the fate of the
erotogenic zones draws attention to the limited nature of this
instinctual vicissitude. One might speak in this sense of a finitude of
human desire that develops according to the range of a determinate and
relatively limited sensorial constitution (it is true
that the erotogenic zones are not limited in number, but they are limited to the surface of the body).
The
fourth
ORDINAL
and principle treatment of sublimation in the
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
occurs in the final attempt of synthesis that terminates the book. In this summary, sublimation is viewed as a
third
ORDINAL
alternative result, along with neurosis and perversion. We already know
that perversion and neurosis are closely connected, for “neuroses are,
so to say, the negative of perversions.” We have also learned from the
previous texts that sublimation has a close connection with perversions
by reason of its economic link with the intermediate aims and erotogenic
zones. In the summary, the
three
CARDINAL
“results” (which foreshadow the instinctual “vicissitudes”) are clearly distinguished: perversion is interpreted in quasi-
Jacksonian
NORP
terms as being due to the weakness of the integrating function of the
genital zone; neurosis, “the negative of perversion,” is associated with
repression; sublimation is conceived as a discharge and use, in areas
other than sexuality, of excessively strong excitations (in this sense,
sublimation is still being dealt with in the context of abnormal
constitutions). Nevertheless, to these “perilous dispositions”
Freud
ORG
attributes “a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency”:
esthetic creativity is one of these reactional manifestations. More
exactly, artistic dispositions present a mixture, in every proportion,
of efficiency, perversion, and neurosis.
What, finally, is the
relationship between sublimation and repression? Surprisingly, this last
text treats repression as a subspecies of sublimation; connected with
this subspecies are a person’s character traits, which stem, as we know,
from sexual organizations that have been established through fixation,
sublimation, and repression. But
Freud
ORG
is quick to add that repression and sublimation are processes “of which the inner causes are quite unknown to us.”
Freud
ORG
regards them as “constitutional dispositions.” The objection has been
made, not unreasonably, that there is no clinical evidence in support of
the theory that sublimation derives its energy
from infantile erotogenic zones in individuals with
abnormally strong sexual constitutions. These texts do not even enable
us to form a definite opinion about the causes or mechanism of
sublimation. What are the respective roles, or even simply the meaning,
of the derivation and the reaction-formation? It is not easy to say; the
only factors treated with precision are the reaction-formations of
disgust, shame, and morality. Artistic sublimation is mentioned but not
developed; instead, a parallel example of reaction-formation is
developed—scopophilia. Finally, nothing justifies our saying that the
values, esthetic or otherwise, toward which the energy is channeled or
displaced, would be created by this mechanism. It would seem that while
creativity is derived, its objects are not.
Subsequent texts add
more difficulties than solutions. We have already examined the pair
sublimation-idealization in the paper “On Narcissism.” We recall that
idealization concerns the object of an instinct, sublimation its
direction and aim; this distinction enables
Freud
ORG
to stress the difference between the
two
CARDINAL
mechanisms, so far as idealization is obtained by force. In this new
context, sublimation is contrasted sharply with repression, but a
metapsychologi-cal revision of the mechanism of sublimation on a par
with the revision of the mechanism of repression is not proposed. The
more
Freud
ORG
distinguishes sublimation from the other mechanisms, in particular from
repression, and even from reaction-formation, the more its own
mechanism remains unexplained: sublimation is a displacement of energy,
but not a repression of it; it seems to be dependent upon an ability
especially pronounced in artists.
The only truly new descriptive characteristics were introduced during the period of
The Ego and the Id. Sublimation
WORK_OF_ART
profits from the enormous work that
Freud
ORG
put into the elaboration of a metapsychology of the superego. The
abandonment of sexual aims which is required by the process of
introjection is described both as an exchange between the object and the
ego—object-libido being transformed into narcissistic libido—and as a
desexualization. Such desexualization, he adds, is
a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question arises, and
deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the universal
road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not take place
through
the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido
into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to give it another
aim.
The
two
CARDINAL
innovations, then, are as follows. On the one hand, de-sexualization
becomes the central factor in what the earlier texts called deviation or
displacement;
Freud
ORG
now assumes the existence of a neutral and displaceable energy which
can be added to either the erotic or the destructive instincts. On the
other hand, the ego— in the sense of the
second
ORDINAL
topography—is the necessary intermediary in this transformation; thus
sublimation is connected with the alteration of the ego that we have
called identification; and as identification centers on the model-image
of the father, the superego is implied in the process of desexualization
and sublimation. We have, therefore, a continuous
three
CARDINAL
-term sequence: desexualization, identification, sublimation. At this
point, we have moved away from our initial basis: sublimation is no
longer seen as a perverse infantile component that has deviated toward
the nonsexual; it is an object-cathexis of the Oedipus period that has
been internalized through desexualization and the pressure of forces
that brought about the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. But it is difficult to say which notion grounds which: desexualization, sublimation, and identification are rather
three
CARDINAL
enigmas placed end to end. Unfortunately, this does not make for a very clear picture.
Freud
ORG
’s failure to resolve the problem of sublimation gives us matter for
reflection. The empty concept of sublimation enables us on the one hand
to recapitulate the whole series of difficulties enumerated under the
heading of the implicit teleology of
Freudianism
ORG
, and on the other hand to introduce a new train of thought under the very cautious and very propaedeutic heading, “
Toward the Problem of Symbol
WORK_OF_ART
.”
It seems to me that the concept of sublimation has
two
CARDINAL
sides. On the one hand it concerns the set of procedures involved in
the constitution of the sublime—i.e. the higher or highest—aspects of
man; on the other hand it concerns the symbolic instrument of this
constitution of the sublime. We shall restrict ourselves here to the
problematic of the sublime, apart from its symbolic expression.
30
CARDINAL
. The Ego and the Id,
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
258
CARDINAL
; SE,
19
CARDINAL
,
30
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, p.
223
CARDINAL
.
By and large, this
first
ORDINAL
side of the problem corresponds to the ethical aspects of sublimation (the
second
ORDINAL
side corresponds in general to its esthetic aspects).
Freud
ORG
himself assigned a privileged status to these ethical aspects by linking sublimation
first
ORDINAL
to reaction-formations (shame, modesty, etc.), then to identification.
Now,
all the procedures or mechanisms that are set into operation by the
constitution of the higher agency, whether they be called idealization,
identification, or sublimation, remain unintelligible in the framework
of an economics. The theory of the superego oscillates between a monism
of energy, inherited from the
first
ORDINAL
topography, and a dualism of desire and authority. According to the monism of energy, there is
only one
CARDINAL
source of energy—the id, or narcissism in the sense of the reservoir of
instincts; according to the dualism of desire and authority, the only
figure irreducible to desire is the father figure. From the point of
view of energy, everything proceeds from the reservoir of the id; but in
order for desire to be torn away from itself, in order for the superego
to be differentiated as a reaction-formation, authority must be
introduced under the guise of the father. Thus
Freud
ORG
maintains
two
CARDINAL
theses with equal force: the superego is acquired from without and, in
this sense, is not primal; on the other hand, the superego is the
expression of the most powerful instincts and the most important
libidinal vicissitudes of the id. The whole economy of the superego is
reflected in the concept of sublimation; this concept forms a kind of
compromise between
two
CARDINAL
requirements: to internalize an “outside” (authority, father figure,
any form of master) and to differentiate an “inside” (libido,
narcissism, id). The sublimation of the “lower” into the “higher” is the
counterpart of the introjection of the “outside.” Reaction-formation,
the formation of an ideal, and sublimation designate related modalities
of this doctrinal compromise. But is such a compromise self-consistent?
Does it not conceal an unbridgeable hiatus when taken in separation from
a dialectic of archeology and teleology? For my part I doubt that
Freud
ORG
succeeded in reducing the fundamental gap between the externality of
authority, to which he is condemned by his refusal of an ethical
foundation inherent in the positing of the ego, and the solipsism of
desire, which stems from his initial economic hypothesis that every
formation of an ideal is ultimately a differentiation of the id. Freud-
ianism
lacks a suitable theoretical instrument to render intelligible the
absolutely primal dialectic between desire and the other than desire.
The
failure of the theory of sublimation thus has the same meaning as the
discordance between the concept of identification and the economics:
“the desire to be like,” we said with
Freud
ORG
himself, is irreducible to “the desire to have.” Sublimation conceals
an irre-ducibility of the same order; it too may be said to precede and
embrace all the formations derived by way of esthetic transfer of
sensual pleasure from erotogenic zones or by way of desexualiza-tion of
the libido during the dissolution of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex. None of these derived formations accounts for either a
primordial identification or the primal power of sublimation. The
relationship between sublimation and identification enables us to relate
the unresolved enigma of sublimation to the origin of
self-consciousness in the dialectic of desire.
The relationship between sublimation and the formation of an ideal, as the latter is developed in the paper “
On Narcissism
WORK_OF_ART
,” suggests the same dialectical reinterpretation of all these related mechanisms. I realize that
Freud
ORG
’s purpose in bringing sublimation and idealization together is to
distinguish them from each other; according to the mechanism of
idealization, the ideal remains “the substitute for the lost narcissism
of [our] childhood.” Nevertheless, this projection of the ideal, a
projection stemming from narcissism, presupposes that the ego of this
abortive
Cogito
PERSON
includes a minimum of ethical meaning, that the ego can have regard for
itself, value itself, condemn itself. It is surely not a matter of
indifference to learn from psychoanalysis that the formation of ideals
stems from the false
Cogito
PERSON
, that what we call our ideals are quite often simply projections of
that same self-love to which we attributed, in another context, the
resistance to truth. Idealization in the
Freudian
NORP
sense is thereby connected with the
Nietzschean
NORP
genealogy of morals. We have already stressed this indisputable
contribution of psychoanalysis. But across this narcissistic parentage
of ideals there arises a more radical problem. What does it mean that
the ego evaluates, is capable of respect or blame, engages in approval
and self-
31
DATE
. “
On Narcissism: An Introduction
WORK_OF_ART
,”
GW
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
CARDINAL
,
94
CARDINAL
.
approval, disapproval and self-repudiation? In our presentation of the
Freudian
NORP
theory of idealization, we suggested that this process might give some
support to the fleeting and perhaps unintentional distinction between
the ideal ego and the ego-ideal; a further basis for the distinction
might be the attribution to the ego of a
Selbst
PERSON
-achtung, a “self-regard,” initially posited in narcissism itself. If
the ego can fear castration, and later on anticipate social blame and
punishment and internalize them as moral condemnation, the reason is
that it is sensible to threats other than physical danger. For the fear
of castration to take on an ethical significance, the threat to one’s
self-regard must initially be distinct from any other menace; to acquire
the meaning of condemnation and punishment, the threat to physical
integrity must symbolize the threat to existential integrity.
Thus, whether
one
CARDINAL
links sublimation with identification or with idealization, sublimation takes us back to the central difficulty of the whole
Freudian
NORP
problematic of agencies: ego, id, and superego.
Psychoanalysis
GPE
is capable of deciphering the ethical characteristics of the ego
through affective situations of a regressive nature. This is true not
only in practice but in theory; as we have seen, sublimation can be
expressed in economic terms only as a regression to narcissism. I grant
that this regression, understood as an economic concept, does not
coincide with the temporal regression, i.e. with a return to the past, a
return to childhood (of mankind or of the individual). But even when it
is taken in the most economic and the least temporal sense, when it is
conceived as an abandonment of object-cathexis and a return to the
narcissistic reservoir, the regression calls for an antithetical concept
that seems to have no place in the
Freudian
NORP
economy, the concept of progression. How can narcissism differentiate
itself, displace itself? How can a precipitate of identifications
deposit itself in the ego and modify the ego, if the process is not a
progression by means of a regression? And what is the principle
according to which this progression operates? The principle seems quite
difficult to elaborate with the resources of the
Freudian
NORP
metapsychology, although it is constantly presupposed in
32
DATE
. Ibid.,
GW
ORG
,
10
CARDINAL
,
160
CARDINAL
; SE,
14
DATE
,
93
CARDINAL
.
an unthematized way by analytic practice. These questions do
not disqualify psychoanalysis in the least; psychoanalysis greatly
benefits reflection by enabling us to raise these questions in the
context of the inauthentic modalities of fear and dread, narcissistic
selfattachment, and also hate—the hatred of life at the heart of our own
existence—and even a hidden complicity with death. Psychoanalysis
raises these questions negatively, as it were, by unmasking the archaic,
infantile and instinctual, narcissistic and masochistic features of our
alleged sublimity.
Ultimately, through the more highly
elaborated concepts of identification and idealization, the empty
concept of sublimation refers us back to the operative, unthematized
concepts of the
Freudian
NORP
economics. I will sum them all up in the unique task of the process of
becoming conscious, which defines the finality of analysis. In the New
Introductory Lectures,
Freud
ORG
writes: “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Ultimately, the task of
becoming I, of becoming the ego, a task set within the economics of
desire, is in principle irreducible to the economics. But this task
remains the unspoken factor in
Freud
ORG
’s doctrine; the empty concept of sublimation is the final symbol of
this unspoken factor. That is why all the difficulties we have
encountered under the heading of the implicit teleology of
Freudianism
ORG
are mirrored in this concept. These difficulties may be summed up as follows:
1
CARDINAL
. If desire is to enter into culture, there must be assumed an initial
relationship between desire and a source of valuation external to the
field of energy.
2
CARDINAL
. If the ego’s identification with its other is to be possible, a pairing of subjectivities must be postulated.
3
CARDINAL
. If identification is to be included in a process of idealization of the ego, an original self-regard, a primal
Selbstachtung
ORG
, must be assumed.
4
CARDINAL
. Finally, in a direction contrary to the regressive movement
psychoanalysis sets forth in theory, there must be supposed an aptitude
for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which
the theory does not thematize.
33
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
DATE
,
86
DATE
(
Wo Es war
PERSON
, soil
Ich
PERSON
werden);
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
80
CARDINAL
.
I have tried to conceptualize this interplay of progression
and regression by means of a radical dialectic, a dialectic of
archeology and teleology. Thereby I hope I have advanced, not only in
the understanding of
Freud
ORG
, but in the understanding of myself, for a reflective mode of thought
that undertakes such a dialectic is already on the path that leads from
abstract reflection to concrete reflection. There remains the task of
understanding that progression and regression are carried by the same
symbols—in short, that symbolism is the area of identity between
progression and regression. To understand this would be to enter into
concrete reflection.
Chapter 4
LAW
: Hermeneutics: The Approaches to Symbol
It is only now that we reach the level of the most ambitious interrogations of our “
Problematic
NORP
”; and it is only now that we can glimpse a solution—no longer eclectic,
but dialectical—of the hermeneutic conflict. We now know that the key
to the solution lies in the dialectic between archeology and teleology.
It remains to find the concrete “mixed texture” in which we see the
archeology and teleology. This concrete mixed texture is symbol. I
propose to show, at my own risk, that what psychoanalysis describes as
overdetermination finds its full meaning in a dialectic of
interpretation, whose opposed poles are constituted by archeology and
teleology.
It was impossible to understand the overdetermination
of symbols without making a long and involved detour; we could not
appeal to such overdetermination as our starting point, nor is it
certain that we truly can attain to it; that is why I speak of the
approaches to symbol. As I said in
the “Problematic
ORG
,” a general hermeneutics does not yet lie within our scope; this book
is no more than a propaedeutic to that extensive work. The task we set
ourselves was to integrate into reflection the opposition between
conflicting hermeneutics. Now that we have made such a long detour we
are simply at the threshold of our enterprise. Let us turn back and
consider the path we have taken.
First
ORDINAL
, it was necessary to pass through the stage of dispossession —the
dispossession of consciousness as the place and origin of meaning.
Freudian
NORP
psychoanalysis appeared to us as the discipline best equipped to
instigate and carry through this ascesis of reflection: its topography
and its economic help displace the locus of meaning toward the
unconscious, that is, toward an origin over
which we have no control. This
first
ORDINAL
stage terminates in an archeology of reflection.
Next, it was
necessary to traverse an antithetic of reflection. Here the
archeological interpretation appeared as the counterpart of a
progressive genesis of meaning through successive figures, where the
meaning of each figure is dependent upon the meaning of the subsequent
figures.
Finally,
Hegel
PERSON
served as an inverse model and helped us form a dialectic, not between
Freud
ORG
and
Hegel
PERSON
, but in each
one
CARDINAL
of them. It is only when each interpretation is seen to be contained in
the other that the antithetic is no longer simply the clash of
opposites but the passage of each into the other. Only then is
reflection truly in the archeology and the archeology in the teleology:
reflection, teleology, and archeology pass over into one another.
Now that we have thought through in the abstract the reconciliation of these
two
CARDINAL
lines of interpretation, the possibility arises of seeking their point of intersection in the meaningful texture of symbols.
In
this sense, symbols are the concrete moment of the dialectic, but they
are not its immediate moment. The concrete is always the fullness or
peak of mediation. The return to the simple attitude of listening to
symbols is the “reward consequent upon thought.” The concreteness of
language which we border upon through painstaking approximation is the
second
ORDINAL
naivete of which we have merely a frontier or threshold knowledge.
The
danger for the philosopher (for the philosopher, I say, and not for the
poet) is to arrive too quickly, to lose the tension, to become
dissipated in the symbolic richness, in the abundance of meaning. I do
not retract the descriptions of the problematic; I continue to state
that symbols call for interpretation because of their peculiar
signifying structure in which meaning inherently refers beyond itself.
But the explanation of this structure requires the
threefold
CARDINAL
discipline of dispossession, antithetic, and dialectic. In order to
think in accord with symbols one must subject them to a dialectic; only
then is it possible to set the dialectic within interpretation itself
and come back to living speech. This last stage of reappropriation
constitutes the transition to concrete reflection. In returning to the
attitude of listening to language, reflection passes into the fullness of speech simply heard and understood.
Let
us not be mistaken about the meaning of this last stage: this return to
the immediate is not a return to silence, but rather to the spoken
word, to the fullness of language. Nor is it a return to the dense
enigma of initial, immediate speech, but to speech that has been
instructed by the whole process of meaning. Hence this concrete
reflection does not imply any concession to irrationality or
effusiveness. In its return to the spoken word, reflection continues to
be reflection, that is, the understanding of meaning; reflection becomes
hermeneutic; this is the only way in which it can become concrete and
still remain reflection. The
second
ORDINAL
naivete is not the
first
ORDINAL
naivete; it is postcritical and not precritical; it is an informed naivete.
THE OVERDETERMINATION OF SYMBOLS
The
thesis I am proposing is this: what psychoanalysis calls
overdetermination cannot be understood apart from a dialectic between
two
CARDINAL
functions which are thought to be opposed to one another but which
symbols coordinate in a concrete unity. Thus the ambiguity of symbolism
is not a lack of uni-vocity but is rather the possibility of carrying
and engendering opposed interpretations, each of which is
self-consistent.
The
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics,
one
CARDINAL
turned toward the revival of archaic meanings belonging to the infancy
of mankind, the other toward the emergence of figures that anticipate
our spiritual adventure, develop, in opposite directions, the beginnings
of meaning contained in language—a language richly endowed with the
enigmas that men have invented and received in order to express their
fears and hopes. Thus we should say that symbols carry
two
CARDINAL
vectors. On the one hand, symbols repeat our childhood in all the
senses, chronological and nonchronological, of that childhood. On the
other hand, they explore our adult life: “O my prophetic soul,” says
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
. But these
two
CARDINAL
functions are not external to one another; they constitute the overdetermination of authentic symbols. By probing our
infancy
and making it live again in the oneiric mode, symbols represent the
projection of our human possibilities onto the area of imagination.
These authentic symbols are truly regressive-progressive; remembrance
gives rise to anticipation; archaism gives rise to prophecy.
Pursuing
this analysis of the intentional structure of symbols more deeply, I
would say that the opposition between regression and progression, which
we have struggled to establish and to overcome at the same time, throws
light on the paradoxical texture described as the unity of concealing
and showing. True symbols are at the crossroads of the
two
CARDINAL
functions which we have by turns opposed to and grounded in one
another. Such symbols both disguise and reveal. While they conceal the
aims of our instincts, they disclose the process of self-consciousness.
Disguise, reveal; conceal, show; these
two
CARDINAL
functions are no longer external to one another; they express the
two
CARDINAL
sides of a single symbolic function. Because of their overdetermination
symbols realize the concrete identity between the progression of the
figures of spirit or mind and the regression to the key signifiers of
the unconscious. Advancement of meaning occurs only in the sphere of the
projections of desire, of the derivatives of the unconscious, of the
revivals of archaism. We nourish our least carnal symbols with desires
that have been checked, deviated, transformed. We represent our ideals
with images issuing from cleansed desire. Thus symbols represent in a
concrete unity what reflection in its antithetic stage is forced to
split into opposed interpretations; the opposed hermeneutics disjoin and
decompose what concrete reflection recomposes through a return to
speech simply heard and understood. If my analysis is correct,
sublimation is not a supplementary procedure that could be accounted for
by an economics of desire. It is not a mechanism that could be put on
the same plane as the other instinctual vicissitudes, alongside
reversal, turning round upon the self, and repression. Insofar as
revealing and disguising coincide in it, we might say that sublimation
is the symbolic function itself.
Reflection
ORG
’s initial approach to this function is necessarily divisive. An
economics isolates the element of disguise in the symbolic function,
insofar as dreams distort the secret intentions of our forbidden
desires. The economics must then be counterbalanced by a phenomenology
of mind or spirit in order to preserve the other dimension and to show
that symbols involve a development of the self that opens up to what the
symbols disclose. But one must go beyond this dichotomy which always
keeps recurring within symbols; one must see that this
second
ORDINAL
function of symbols runs through and takes into itself the projective
function in order to raise it up and, in the proper sense of the term,
sublimate it. By means of disguise and projection something further
transpires—a function of dis-covery, of dis-closure, which sublimates
the oneirism of man.
To what extent does this conception of the dialectical structure of symbols retain a connection with orthodox
Freudian
NORP
doctrine? I do not deny that
Freud
ORG
would reject our interpretation of overdetermination. But the treatment of symbols in
The Interpretation of Dreams and the Introductory Lectures
WORK_OF_ART
is less unfavorable to our position, because of the ambiguities and unsolved difficulties
Freud
ORG
encounters in that treatment. Let us now relate these difficulties to those of sublimation.
Freud
ORG
’s theory of symbolism is indeed quite disconcerting.
<313><314> On the one hand, symbolism in the mechanism of
dreams is very narrowly restricted to the stereotypes that resist the
piecemeal method of deciphering dreams through the dreamer’s free
associations. In this sense there is no strictly symbolic function that
might stand as a distinct procedure alongside condensation,
displacement, and pictorial representation. Nor does symbolization
constitute a peculiar problem from the point of view of dream
interpretation, for the symbols used in dreams have been formed
elsewhere. Symbols have a permanently fixed meaning in dreams, like the
grammalogues in shorthand. Consequently their interpretation can be
direct and does not require a long and difficult work of deciphering.
<
313
CARDINAL
> It is true that the distinction between overdetermination and overinterpretation is to be found in
Freud
ORG
:
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
253
CARDINAL
(
1
CARDINAL
),
270
CARDINAL
(
1
CARDINAL
),
272
CARDINAL
,
528
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
248
CARDINAL
, n.
1
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
, n.
2
CARDINAL
(an addition of
1914
CARDINAL
concerning the interpretation of the
Oedipus
LOC
myth),
266
CARDINAL
, and SE,
5
CARDINAL
,
523
CARDINAL
. But this overinterpretation does not denote interpretations that differ from that of psychoanalysis; cf. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
2
CARDINAL
, p.
193
CARDINAL
, n.
25
CARDINAL
.
<
314
CARDINAL
> Besides the works of
J. Lacan
PERSON
, which have been already cited, see
S. Nacht
PERSON
and
P. C. Racamier
PERSON
, “
La Theorie
PERSON
psychanalytique du delire,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
22
CARDINAL
(
1958
DATE
),
418
CARDINAL
-574;
R. Diatkine
PERSON
and
M. Benassy
PERSON
, “On-togenese du fantasme,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
28 (1964
DATE
),
217-34
CARDINAL
;
J. La-planche
PERSON
and
J. B. Pontalis
PERSON
, “Fantasme originaire, fantasme des origines, origine du fantasme,”
Les Temps modernes,
WORK_OF_ART
19
CARDINAL
(
1964
DATE
),
1833-68
DATE
.
Lecture X of the
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
on
Psychoanalysis
FAC
confirms this
first
ORDINAL
aspect of the problem: the comparisons at the basis of dream-symbols
“lie ready to hand and are complete, once and for all.” <
315
CARDINAL
> More than
fifteen years
DATE
after
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, the question of symbolism is still set within the context of the
failure of the method of free association. Symbols are subject to fixed
or constant translations—“just as popular ‘dream-books’ provide
[translations] for everything that appears in dreams.” <
316
CARDINAL
> And
Freud
ORG
expressly states: “A constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and its translation is described by us as a ‘
symbolic’
PERSON
one, and the dream-element itself as a ‘symbol’ of the unconscious
dream-thought.” <317><318> Thus the symbolic relation
becomes a “
fourth
ORDINAL
” relation in addition to condensation, displacement, and pictorial
representation. The interpretation of symbols by means of “stable
translations” forms a supplement to interpretation based on association.
As in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
,
Freud
ORG
again refers to
Schemer
ORG
as being the
first
ORDINAL
to recognize that symbolism is essentially a fantasying of the body.
What is symbolically represented is the human body. The sexual etiology
of the neuroses enabled
Freud
ORG
to center this symbolization on sexuality and to link the fantasying of
the body with the general finality of dreams, that is, with their
function of substitute satisfaction.
<
315
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
168
CARDINAL
; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
165
CARDINAL
.
<
316
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
151
CARDINAL
-52; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
150
CARDINAL
.
<
317
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
318
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
If the reader considers only the content this symbolism
the-matizes, he might hastily conclude that Lecture X has nothing
interesting to offer. From the standpoint of what is thematized one can
only say that,
first
ORDINAL
, the “contents” discovered are monotonous —they are always the same
things: the genitals, sexual processes, sexual intercourse; and
second
ORDINAL
, the representations symbolizing them are extremely numerous—the same
subject matter can be symbolized by almost anything. This curious fact
raises the question
of the common element, the tertium comparationis, of the supposed comparison. <
319
CARDINAL
> It is precisely the disproportion <
320
CARDINAL
> between the number of symbols and the monotony of the contents,
especially when “the common element is not understood,” <
321
CARDINAL
> that directly poses the problem of the constitution of the symbolic
relation. Dreams do not institute this relation; they find it ready
made and they make use of it. Hence the elaboration of a dream does not
involve any work of symbolization comparable to what was described as
the work of condensation, displacement, and pictorial representation.
But how then do we “come to know the meaning of these dream-symbols”?
The answer is that
<
319
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
153-54
DATE
; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
152
CARDINAL
.
<
320
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
154
CARDINAL
; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
153
CARDINAL
.
<
321
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
157
CARDINAL
.
we learn it from very different sources—from fairy tales and
myths, from buffoonery and jokes, from folklore (that is, from knowledge
about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic
and colloquial linguistic usage. In all these directions we come upon
the same symbolism, and in some of them we can understand it without
further instruction. If we go into these sources in detail, we shall
find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we cannot fail to be
convinced of our interpretations. <
322
CARDINAL
>
<
322
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
160
CARDINAL
-61; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
158
CARDINAL
-59.
Thus it is not the dream-work that constructs the symbolic
relation, but the work of culture. This means that the symbolic relation
is formed within language. But
Freud
ORG
does not draw any consequences from this discovery; the analogy between
myths and dreams simply verifies and confirms our dream
interpretations. Thus
Otto Rank’s
PERSON
study of “the birth of the hero” simply furnishes parallels to the
symbolic representations of birth that occur in dreams. The confirmation
of the sexual symbolism of dreams by the symbolism of myths is
equivalent to a reduction of the mythical to the oneiric—even though
myths supply the element of speech in which the semantics of symbolism
has actually been built up.
The puzzling thing about symbols is not that ships stand for
women
but that women are signified and, in order to be signified on the level
of images, verbalized. It is the spoken woman that becomes the dreamed
woman; it is the mythicized woman that becomes the oneiric woman. But
how is one to examine myths without also examining rituals and cults,
emblems and heraldic devices (
Freud
ORG
mentions the
French
NORP
fleur-de-lis and the triskeles of
Sicily
GPE
and
the Isle of Man)?
GPE
Freud
ORG
is well aware that there is more in myths, fairy tales, sayings, and
poetry than in dreams. He himself emphasizes this fact at the end of his
study of symbolism. But the fact itself is simply the occasion for
showing that psychoanalysis is a discipline of “general interest,” that
it establishes links with other disciplines, and that in these links, as
he proudly states, “the share of psychoanalysis is in the
first
ORDINAL
instance that of giver and only to a less extent that of receiver”:
<323><324> “it is psychoanalysis which provides the
technical methods and the points of view whose application in these
other fields should prove fruitful.” <
325
CARDINAL
> There is reason to fear that the comparative method is being restricted here to a mere apologetics.
<
323
PRODUCT
>
GW
PERSON
,
11
CARDINAL
,
170
CARDINAL
-71; SE,
15
CARDINAL
,
167
CARDINAL
-68.
<
324
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
<
325
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
This imperialism was unfortunately reinforced by certain supplementary but disastrous hypotheses concerning language itself.
Freud
ORG
is struck by the fact that the symbolism employed in myths is less
exclusively sexual than the symbolism of dreams. He reduces the anomaly
in the following way. He supposes a state of language in which all
symbols were sexual symbols, a state in which “the original sounds of
speech served for communication, and summoned the speaker’s sexual
partner.” <
326
CARDINAL
> Later on, a sexual interest became attached to work; but man
accepted this displacement of sexual interest only by treating work as
an equivalent of and substitute for sexual activity. The ambiguity of
language dates from this period when “words enunciated during work in
common thus had
two
CARDINAL
meanings; they denoted sexual acts as well as the working activity equated with them. ... In this way a number of verbal roots
paper “
The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words
WORK_OF_ART
,” which we discussed above, “
Dialectic
NORP
,” Ch.
1
CARDINAL
, p.
397
CARDINAL
, n.
68
CARDINAL
.
would have been formed, all of which were of sexual origin and
had subsequently lost their sexual meaning.” If this hypothesis, which
Freud
ORG
borrows from the
Scandinavian
NORP
philologist
H. Sperber
PERSON
, were correct, the symbolic relation, which dreams preserve better than
myths, “would be the residue of an ancient verbal identity.” It is
clear why
Freud
ORG
adopted this nonanalytic hypothesis; it gives our dreams an advantage
over myths; although myths provide the broadest parallels of sexual
symbolism, the fact that dream-symbolism is almost exclusively sexual is
justified by this “primitive language” of which dreams would be the
privileged witness.
But even if we were to credit this hypothesis
with some linguistic value, it casts us adrift: all dream-symbolism is
found to be related to an activity of language, but the enigma of this
activity is simply disguised by the supposition of an original verbal
identity where the same words denote the sexual and the nonsexual. The
hypothesis of these ancient ambiguous roots is simply an expedient
whereby one solves the problem by projecting it into a “basic language”
in which similarity would already be identity.
15
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
16
CARDINAL
. Ibid.
17
CARDINAL
.
Ernest Jones’
PERSON
essay on symbolism (“
The Theory of Symbolism
WORK_OF_ART
” [
1916
DATE
], in Papers on Psychoanalysis [
5th
ORDINAL
ed.
London
GPE
,
Bailliere
ORG
,
Tindall
ORG
and
Cox
PERSON
,
1948
DATE
], Ch.
3
CARDINAL
, pp.
87-144
CARDINAL
) is no doubt the most remarkable work of the
Freudian
NORP
school that is based on Lecture X of the Introductory Lectures. It is of great interest from
three
CARDINAL
points of view: descriptive, genetic, and critical.
Descriptively,
the author places symbols, in the psychoanalytic sense, in the general
class of indirect representations commonly called symbolic and
characterized by the role of double meaning, by the analogy between
primary meaning and secondary meaning, by the attributes of concreteness
and primitiveness, by the fact that symbols represent hidden or secret
ideas, and by the fact that they are made spontaneously. To specify the
characteristics of “true symbolism,” Jones comments on and modifies the
criteria proposed by
Rank and Sachs
ORG
in their
Die Bedeutung
PRODUCT
der
Psychoanalyse
PERSON
fiXr die Geisteswissenschaften (
1913
DATE
): (
1
CARDINAL
) true symbols always represent repressed unconscious themes; (
2
CARDINAL
) they have a constant meaning, or very limited scope for variation in meaning; (
3
CARDINAL
) they are not dependent on individual factors only; this is not to say that they are archetypes in the
Jungian
NORP
sense, but rather that they are stereotypes that betray the limited and
uniform character of the primordial interests of mankind; (
4
CARDINAL
) they are archaic; (
5
CARDINAL
) they have linguistic connections, strikingly revealed by etymology; (
6
CARDINAL
) they have parallels in the fields of myth, folklore, poetry.
In
my opinion, these speculations close more paths than they open. By
assuming everything at the outset, they imply that thereafter we can
never encounter anything but residues. When we presented the theory of
symbol as given in
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
, we asked whether
Freud
ORG
was not mistaken in limiting the notion of symbol to common stenographic signs; are symbols
DATE
Thus the range of symbolism is candidly restricted to the substitute
figures that arise from a compromise between the unconscious and the
censorship; moreover, all symbols represent themes relating to the
bodily self, immediate blood relatives, or the phenomena of birth, love,
and death. This is so because these themes correspond to the earliest
repressed functions which were held in such high esteem in primitive
civilizations.
Jones
PERSON
then goes on to explain why sexuality, the invariant theme of
symbolism, has invested such varied regions of language, and why
association operates from the sexual to the nonsexual and never in the
reverse direction. It is here that the switch is made from the
descriptive point of view to the genetic explanation. As for the origin
of the associative connection which is the basis of symbolism, it is not
enough to call attention to an incapacity for discrimination (an
“apperceptive insufficiency”) in primitive minds, which in other
respects are so gifted in making distinctions and classifications.
Following
Freud
PERSON
, Jones adopts the theory of the
Swedish
NORP
philologist
Sperber
PERSON
of a primal identity of sexual language and the language of work, the
same words having originally served the purpose of calling the sexual
mate and of providing rhythmic accompaniment during work; since that
time weapons and tools, seed and ploughed land symbolically express
sexual things. In my opinion,
Jones’
PERSON
paper underscores the expediency of this explanation, which assumes
everything by making identity prior to similarity. More seriously still,
the explanation glosses over the prior difficulty concerning the
elevation of erotic impulses to language and the fact that such impulses
are capable of being indefinitely symbolized. It is not sufficient
simply to invoke “the call of the mate”; one must proceed to reflect on
what makes desire speak—namely, the absence inherent in instincts and
the connection between lost objects and symbolization. In answer to the
second
ORDINAL
question concerning the origin of symbolism—why symbolism should take place in
one
CARDINAL
direction only
—Jones
ORG
posits that symbolism has a single function, that of disguising
prohibited themes: “Only what is repressed is symbolized; only what is
repressed needs to be symbolized. This conclusion is the touchstone of
the psychoanalytic theory of symbolism” (p.
116
CARDINAL
).
This answer, which excludes any doctrinal compromise, leads to the critical part of
Jones’
PERSON
paper, the part that directly concerns my own enterprise. The criticism is aimed primarily at
Silberer
ORG
, who, starting in
1909
DATE
, had developed in
a half dozen
CARDINAL
essays a very detailed theory of the formation of symbols. For
Silberer
ORG
, the production of symbols includes other procedures besides the disguising of sexual themes that have been repressed
merely
vestiges, or are they not also the dawn of meaning? We can now take up
the question again in the light of our dialectical conception of
overdetermination. I suggest that we distinguish various levels of
creativity of symbols (before distinguishing, in the following section,
various spheres in which symbols actually occur). At the lowest level we
come upon sedimented symbolism: here we find by the censorship; thus
symbols may be formed of the modes or ways in which the mind is working
(slowly, quickly, lightly, heavily, cheerfully, successfully, etc.).
Repression would simply be one of these modes of mental functioning.
Jones’
PERSON
main objection to this “functional symbolism” is that it has
“proceeded, by rejecting the hardly won knowledge of the unconscious, to
reinterpret the psychoanalytical findings back again into the surface
meanings characteristic of pre-Freudian experience” (p.
117
CARDINAL
). Thus
Jones
PERSON
rejects any attempt to make sexual symbols the symbols of something
else; in our terminology, the sexual is always signified, and never
signifier. Why this intransigence? The reason,
Jones
PERSON
states, is that repression is the sole cause of the distortion
operative in the formation of true symbols. The passing of material
symbolism (mainly representing sexual things) over into functional
symbolism (representing the modes of mental functioning) is itself a
ruse employed by the unconscious and a manifestation of our resistance
to the only true interpretation of symbolism. Thus
Silberer
ORG
’s interpretation is a defensive or “reactionary” interpretation. Jones
grants that any nonsexual idea may indeed be symbolized, but only if it
has
first
ORDINAL
had some symbolic connection with a sexual theme; it is precisely the
function of metaphor to replace symbolism, which is always grounded in
forbidden impulses, by a harmless presentation of the abstract in terms
of the concrete; thus the serpent, a sexual symbol, will become the
metaphor of wisdom, the wedding ring, a symbol of the female organ, the
emblem of fidelity, etc. Every replacement of material symbolism by
functional symbolism is an instance of this type of reinterpretation of
the repressed in harmless terms.
However great the force of this argumentation may be, it seems to me that
Jones’
PERSON
intransigence is not justified; psychoanalysis has no way of proving
that repressed impulses are the only sources of what can be symbolized.
Thus the view that in
Eastern
NORP
religions the phallus became the symbol of a creative power cannot be
dismissed for psychoanalytic reasons, but for philosophical reasons
which must be debated on other grounds.
Jones’
PERSON
disdainful rejection of the view that symbols may have an “anagogic” meaning (
Silberer
PERSON
), a “programmatic” meaning (
Adler
ORG
), or a “prospective” meaning (
Jung
PERSON
) is characteristic: according to
Jones
PERSON
, these authors abandon “the methods and canons of science, particularly the conceptions of causality and determinism” (p.
136
CARDINAL
). The argument is not psychoanalytical, but philosophical. But that is not the root of the matter; every
one
CARDINAL
-sided theory of symbolism seems to me to break down at a precise point:
such theories account for the substitutive or compromise aspect of
symbols, but not for
various stereotyped and fragmented remains
of symbols, symbols so commonplace and worn with use that they have
nothing but a past. This is the level of dream-symbolism, and also of
fairy tales and legends; here the work of symbolization is no longer
operative. At a
second
ORDINAL
level we come upon the symbols that function in everyday life; these
are the symbols that are useful and are actually utilized, that have a
past and a present, and that in the clockwork of a given society serve
as a token for the nexus of social pacts; structural anthropology
operates at this level. At a higher level come the prospective symbols;
these are creations of meaning that take up the traditional symbols with
their multiple significations and serve as the vehicles of new
meanings. This creation of meaning reflects the living substrate of
symbolism, a substrate that is not the result of social sedimentation.
Later in this chapter we will try to state how this creation of meaning
is at the same time a recapture of archaic fantasies and a living
interpretation of this fantasy substrate. Dreams provide a key only for
the symbolism of the
first
ORDINAL
level; the “typical” dreams
Freud
ORG
appeals to in developing his theory of symbolism do not reveal the
canonical form of symbols but merely their vestiges on the plane of
sedimented expressions. The true task, therefore, is to grasp symbols in
their creative moment, and not when they arrive at the end of their
course and are revived in dreams, like stenographic grammalogues with
their “permanently
their power of denying and overcoming their own origin. Symbolism in the
Freudian
NORP
sense expresses the failure of sublimation and not its advancement, as
Jones
PERSON
readily admits: “The affect investing the symbolized ideas has not, in
so far as the symbolism is concerned, proved capable of that
modification in quality denoted by the term ‘sublimation’” (p.
139
CARDINAL
). Moreover,
Jones
PERSON
himself introduces a
second
ORDINAL
pole of the symbolic function when he considers symbolism in terms of
the reality principle and not simply in terms of the pleasure principle
(pp.
132
CARDINAL
ff.) and quite correctly points out that “every step in progress in the
line of the reality principle connotes, not only a use of this
primordial association [between a new percept and some unconscious
complex], but also a partial renunciation of it” (p.
133
CARDINAL
). However, in the
one
CARDINAL
-sided conception of symbolism, this renunciation can only be a
weakening of true symbolism, as in the case where primitive symbols
serve to facilitate the formation of objective concepts or scientific
generalizations. Such a conception does not account for the immense
symbolic domain explored by
Western
NORP
thought since
Plato
PERSON
and
Origen
ORG
, but only for the pale metaphors of ordinary language and its rhetoric.
fixed meaning.” Further on, the tragedy of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
will enable us to recapture the birth of symbol, at the moment when the
symbol is itself the interpretation of a prior legendary substrate. But
it is impossible to proceed directly to the center of this creative
source. We must make use of all the available mediations.
THE HIERARCHICAL ORDER OF SYMBOL
The dialectical interpretation of the concept of overdetermination, understood as the
twofold
CARDINAL
possibility of a teleological exegesis and a regressive exegesis, must
now be brought to bear on certain definite problems. What are we to take
as our guide? The Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
? As I have said, I do not think we can restore, after
more than a century
DATE
,
The Phenomenology of Spirit
WORK_OF_ART
in the form in which it was written. I propose to put to the test of
reflection a principle of hierarchy that I already used in
Fallible Man
PERSON
to articulate the notion of feeling. <
327
CARDINAL
> The working hypothesis is plausible: feeling, too, is “mixed”; it is that “mixed texture” explored by
Plato in Book IV
PERSON
of the Republic under the title of thumos, i.e. “spiritedness” or “heart.” Spiritedness,
Plato
PERSON
said, sometimes fights on the side of reason in the form of indignation
and courage, and sometimes sides with desire in the form of
aggressiveness, irritation, and anger. Spiritedness, I added, is the
restless heart that knows not the surcease of pleasure and the repose of
happiness, and I suggested that this ambiguous and fragile heart
represents the entire middle region of the affective life between the
vital affections and the rational or spiritual affections, that is to
say, the entire activity that forms the transition between living and
thinking, between
Bios
ORG
and
Logos
LOC
. And I had already noted: “It is in this intermediate region that the
self is constituted as different from natural beings and other selves. .
. . Only with thumos does desire assume the character of otherness and
subjectivity which constitute a self.” <
328
CARDINAL
>
<
327
CARDINAL
>
Ricoeur
ORG
,
L’Homme
ORG
faillible (
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
,
1960
DATE
),
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
4
CARDINAL
, Section
3
CARDINAL
; tr.,
Charles Kelbley
PERSON
,
Fallible Man
PERSON
(
Chicago
GPE
, Regnery,
1965
DATE
).
<
328
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
123
CARDINAL
; Eng. trans., p.
163
CARDINAL
.
I wish to reexamine this problem of mixed texture in the light of our antithesis between the
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics. The same feelings that I previously studied under the heading of thumos will now be seen as being subject to
two
CARDINAL
modes of exegesis,
one
CARDINAL
along the lines of the
Freudian
NORP
erotics, the other along the lines of a phenomenology of spirit.
To this effect, I propose to reexamine the trilogy of fundamental feelings that I borrowed from the
Kantian
NORP
anthropology—the trilogy of the passions of having, power, and
valuation or worth [avoir, pouvoir, valoir]—and to redo the exegesis of
the
three
CARDINAL
“quests” that the moralist knows only under the distorted mask of
fallen figures—the “passions” of possession, domination, and pretension,
or, in another language, of avarice, tyranny, and vanity (
Habsucht
PERSON
,
Herrschsucht
PERSON
,
Ehrsucht
GPE
). What we must discover behind this threefold
Sucht
ORG
, with its aberration and violence, is the authentic
Suchen
PERSON
; “behind this passional pursuit,” we must attain to “the ‘quest’ of
humanity, a quest no longer mad and in bondage but constitutive of human
praxis and the human self.” <
329
CARDINAL
>
<
329
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
., p.
127
CARDINAL
; Eng. trans., pp. 169—70.
I would like to show that this threefold quest pertains to a phenomenology in the style of
Hegel
PERSON
and to an erotics in the style of
Freud
ORG
.
It should be emphasized that the
three
CARDINAL
spheres of meaning through which the trajectory of feeling passes as it
moves from having, to power, and to worth, constitute regions of human
meanings that are in essence nonlibidinal. Not that they are “spheres
free of conflict,” as certain neo-Freudians say; <
330
CARDINAL
> no region of human existence escapes the libidinal cathexis of love
and hate; but the important point is that, whatever be the secondary
cathexis of the interhuman relations formed on the occasions of having,
power, and worth, these spheres of meaning are not constituted by the
libidinal cathexis.
<
330
CARDINAL
>
Heinz Hartmann
PERSON
,
Ego Psychology
PERSON
and
the Problem of Adaptation
ORG
,
Ch.
1
CARDINAL
.
By what, then, are they constituted? It seems to me this is where the
Hegelian
NORP
method is of help.
One
CARDINAL
way of modernizing the
Hegelian
NORP
enterprise would be to constitute through progressive synthesis the
moments of “objectivity” that guide the human feelings as they center on
having, power, and worth. Such moments are indeed moments of
objectivity: to understand these affective factors, which we name
possession, domination, and valuation, is to show that these feelings
internalize a series of object-relations that pertain not to a
phenomenology of perception, but to an economics, a politics, a theory
of culture. The progress of this constitution of objectivity should
guide the investigation of the affectivity proper to man. <
331
CARDINAL
> At the same time that they institute a new relationship to things,
the properly human quests of having, power, and worth institute new
relationships to other persons, through which
one
CARDINAL
can pursue the
Hegelian
NORP
process of the reduplication of consciousness and the advancement of self-consciousness.
<
331
QUANTITY
> As in
Fallible Man
PERSON
, I adopt
Alfred Stern’s
PERSON
idea that feeling internalizes man’s relationship to the world; thus
new aspects of objectivity are internalized in the feelings of
possession, power, and worth.
Let us examine, from this double point of view, the successive constitution of the
three
CARDINAL
spheres of meaning.
By relations of having I understand the relations involved in appropriation and work within a situation of “scarceness.” To
this day
DATE
we know of no other condition of human having. In connection with these
relations, however, we see new human feelings arise that do not pertain
to the biological sphere; these feelings proceed not from life but from
the reflection into human affectivity of a new domain of objects, of a
specific objectivity that is “economic” objectivity. Man appears here as
a being capable of feelings relative to having and of an alienation
that in essence is nonlibidinal. This is the alienation
Marx
PERSON
described in his theory of the fetishism of money; it is the economic alienation that
Marx
PERSON
showed is capable of engendering a “false consciousness,” or
ideological thinking. Thus man becomes adult and, in the same movement,
capable of adult alienation. What is important to note, however, is that
the areas in which these feelings, passions, and alienations multiply
are new objects, values of exchange, monetary signs, structures, and
institutions. We may say, then, that man becomes self-consciousness
insofar as he experiences this economic objectivity as a new modality of
his subjectivity and thus attains specifically human “feelings”
relative to the availability of things as things that have been worked
upon and appropriated, while at the same time he becomes an expropriated
appropriator. This new objectivity gives rise to a specific group of
impulses, ideas, and affects.
The sphere of power should be
examined in the same way, that is to say, from the point of view of
objectivity and the feelings and alienations this objectivity engenders.
The sphere of power is likewise constituted in an objective structure.
Thus
Hegel
PERSON
used the term “objective spirit” to designate the structures and
institutions in which the relation of commanding-obeying, essential to
political power, actualizes and engenders itself; as we see at
the beginning of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right
DATE
, man engenders himself as spiritual will by entering into the relation
of commanding-obeying. Here too the development of self-consciousness is
bound up with a development of “objectivity.” The “feelings” centering
around this “object,” which is power, are specifically human feelings,
such as intrigue, ambition, submission, responsibility; so too the
alienations are specifically human alienations. The ancients already
described these alienations in the figure of the tyrant. Plato clearly
shows how the maladies of the soul, which are exhibited in the figure of
the tyrant, spread out from a center he calls dunamis, or power, and
even extend into the region of language in the form of “flattery”; thus
the tyrant gives rise to the sophist. Hence one can say that man becomes
human insofar as he can enter into the political problematic of power,
adopt the feelings that center around power, and deliver himself up to
the evils accompanying that power. Thus there arises a specifically
adult sphere of guilt; power leads to madness, says
Alain
PERSON
, following
Plato
ORG
. This
second
ORDINAL
example makes it clear how a psychology of consciousness is simply the
projected shadow of this movement of figures that man assumes in
engendering economic and then political objectivity.
The same may be said of the
third
ORDINAL
properly human sphere of meaning, the sphere of valuation or worth. This
third
ORDINAL
moment may be understood as follows: the constitution of the self is
not completed in an economics and a politics, but continues on into the
region of culture. Here too the psychology of personality grasps only
the shadow, that is to say, the aim, present in each man, of being
respected, approved, and recognized as a person. My existence for myself
is dependent on this constitution of self in the opinion of others; my
“self” is shaped by the opinion and acceptance of others. But this
constitution of subjects, this mutual constitution through opinion, is
guided by new figures which may be said to be “objective” in a new
sense. These objects are no longer things, as are the objects in the
sphere of having; they do not always have corresponding institutions, as
do the objects in the sphere of power. These new figures of man are to
be found in the works and monuments of law, art, and literature. The
exploration of man’s possibilities extends into this new kind of
objectivity, the objectivity of cultural objects properly so-called.
Even when
Van Gogh
PERSON
sketches a chair, he at the same time portrays man; he projects a
figure of man, namely the man who “has” this represented world. Thus,
the various modes of cultural expression give these “images” the density
of “thingness”; they make these images exist between men and among men,
by embodying them in “works.” It is through the medium of these works
and monuments that a human dignity and self-regard are formed. Finally,
this is the level at which man can become alienated from himself,
degrade himself, make a fool of himself, destroy himself.
Such
is, it seems to me, the exegesis that may be made of consciousness
according to a method that is not a psychology of consciousness, but a
reflective method that has its starting point in the objective movement
of the figures of man. This objective movement is what
Hegel
PERSON
calls spirit.
Reflection
PERSON
is the means for deriving from this movement the subjectivity that
constitutes itself at the same time that the objectivity engenders
itself.
It is clear that this indirect, mediate approach to
consciousness has nothing to do with an immediate self-presence of
consciousness, an immediate self-certainty.
But no sooner have we
noted the specificity of economic, political, and cultural objectivity,
and the specificity of the related human feelings, than we have to take
the reverse path and point out the gradual cathexis or investment of
these regions of meaning by what
Freud
ORG
calls the “derivatives from the unconscious.” The
three
CARDINAL
spheres we have examined, like the whole life of civilization,
are involved in a history of instincts; none of the figures of the
phenomenology of spirit escapes the libidinal investment, and
consequently the possibilities of regression inherent in the instinctual
situation. We shall outline briefly the dialectic of the
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics at the levels of having and power, and reserve a more
extensive analysis for the symbolism of the strictly cultural sphere.
Freud
ORG
presents a libidinal interpretation of having that is thoroughly
compatible with an interpretation that allows the economic sphere, in
the sense of political economy, its own specificity. Well known are the
attempts made by
Freud
ORG
and his followers to derive the apparently nonlibidinal relations to
things and men from the successive phases through which the libido
passes: oral phase, anal phase, phallic phase, genital phase.
Freud
ORG
uses the term “transformation” (Umsetzung) to designate this
displacement of instinctual emotions from certain erotogenic zones onto
seemingly quite different objects. Thus
Freud
ORG
borrows the notion from
Abraham
PERSON
that after a person’s excrement has lost its value for him,
this
instinctual interest . . . passes over onto objects that can be
presented as gifts. . . . After this, corresponding exactly to analogous
changes of meaning that occur in linguistic development, this ancient
interest in feces is transformed into the high valuation of gold and
money but also makes a contribution to the affective cathexis of baby
and penis. ... If one is not aware of these profound connections, it is
impossible to find one’s way about in the fantasies of human beings, in
their associations, influenced as they are by the unconscious, and in
their symptomatic language. Feces—money—gift—baby—penis are treated
there as though they meant the same thing, and they are represented too
by the same symbols.
Freud
ORG
uses the same terms in speaking of the “formation of character” that
begins in the pregenital phases of the libido; he believes that the
triad of orderliness, thrift, and obstinacy is connected with anal
erotism: “We therefore speak of an ‘anal character’ in which
23
CARDINAL
. New
Introductory Lectures
PERSON
,
GW
ORG
,
15
CARDINAL
,
106
CARDINAL
-07;
SE
PERSON
,
22
DATE
,
100-01
DATE
.
we find this remarkable combination and we draw a contrast to
some extent between the anal character and unmodified anal erotism.”
In this example we can see both the validity and the limits of this type of interpretation. The
Freudian
NORP
interpretation functions as a kind of hyletic of affects (here I take hyle or “matter” in the
Husserlian
NORP
sense of the term). It enables us to set forth the genealogy of the
main human affects and to establish the table of their derivatives; it
verifies Kant’s insight that there is
only one
CARDINAL
“faculty of desiring”; in
Freudian
NORP
terms, our love of money is the same love we had as infants for our
feces. But at the same time we realize that this kind of exploration
into the substructures of our affects does not substitute for a
constitution of the economic object. The regressive genesis of our
desires does not replace a progressive genesis concerned with meanings,
values, symbols. That is why
Freud
ORG
speaks of “transformations of instinct.” But a dynamics of affective
cathexes cannot account for the innovation or advancement of meaning
that is inherent in this transformation.
The same may be said of
the political sphere, which constitutes, as we have seen, a specific
region of interhuman relationships and an original class of human
objects. It is perfectly possible to erect
two
CARDINAL
interpretations upon this single affective complex, an interpretation
according to the figures of the phenomenology of spirit and an
interpretation of the type that
Freud
ORG
elaborated in
1921
DATE
in
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego.
Freud
ORG
regards the concept of “suggestion,” espoused by the social psychology of
the beginning of the century
DATE
, as a screen for the libido: it is Eros, he states, “which holds
together everything in the world.” And he confidently proceeds to write a
chapter on the libidinal structure of the army and the church. We
should not be surprised that an enter-
25
CARDINAL
.
Husserl
PERSON
, Ideen I, §§
85
CARDINAL
,
97
CARDINAL
. It is to be noted that in
Husserl
GPE
the words
Formung
GPE
,
Meinung
PERSON
, and
Deutung
PERSON
designate the relationship of the intentional act to the matter; the intention “interprets” the matter, just as in
Aristotle
GPE
discourse is the interpretation (hermeneia) of the affections (pathe)
of the soul. The comparison is all the more striking in that for
Husserl
PERSON
, the hyle includes both affections or feelings and sensations.
26
CARDINAL
.
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego,
GW
PERSON
,
13
DATE
,
100
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
92
CARDINAL
.
prise of this kind never attains to the level of a structural
analysis of groups. The key notions here are the concrete tie with the
leader and homosexual object-cathexis. The various ideas or causes that
might hold a group or society together are regarded as derived from
interpersonal ties that ultimately are rooted in the invisible leader.
Freud
ORG
admits that “we are concerned here with love instincts which have been
diverted from their original aims, though they do not operate with less
energy on that account.” This inability on the part of a mere
psychoanalysis of the leader to attain to the fundamental constitution
of social ties does not prevent the interpretation from being extremely
penetrating.
Such an investigation inevitably brings us back to the concept of identification; indeed,
Chapter 7 of Group Psychology
LAW
is
Freud
ORG
’s most important study of identification. “A primary group of this kind
is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the
place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves
with one another in their ego.”
28
CARDINAL
But
Freud
ORG
himself points out the limits of his enterprise. Ultimately, his
investigation is concerned less with the formation and development of
social groups than with the regressive characteristics of groups as
described by
Le Bon
ORG
at
the turn of the century
DATE
: namely, “the lack of independence and initiative in their members, the
similarity in the reactions of all of them, their reduction so to
speak, to the level of group individuals”; and at the level of the group
as a whole, “the weakness of intellectual activity, the lack of
emotional restraint, the incapacity for moderation and delay, the
inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion and to
work it off completely in the form of action.”
Even when he
extends his investigation to what he calls “artificial groups”—army or
church—the explanation is still in terms of the libidinal ties holding a
group or the hypothetical primal horde together:
The uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations,
which are shown in the phenomena of suggestion that accom-
pany them, may therefore with justice be traced back to the
fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is
still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed
by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in
Le Bon’s
ORG
phrase, it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group
ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal.
In conclusion,
Freud
ORG
states: “We are aware that what we have been able to contribute towards
the explanation of the libidinal structure of groups leads back to the
distinction between the ego and the ego ideal and to the double kind of
tie which this makes possible— identification, and putting the [external
libidinal] object in the place of the ego ideal.” But if we ask
psychoanalysis what constitutes the specificity of the political tie,
its only answer is to invoke the notion of a “diversion of aim.”
In the same text
Freud
ORG
admits that “there is some difficulty in giving a description of such a
diversion of aim which will conform to the requirements of
metapsychology.” And he adds: “If we choose, we may recognize in this
diversion of aim a beginning of the sublimation of the sexual instincts,
or on the other hand we may fix the limits of sublimation at some more
distant point.” Is this not rather the sign that sublimation is a mixed
concept, which designates both a derivation of energy and an innovation
of meaning? The derivation of energy shows that there is but one libido
and merely various vicissitudes of that one libido, but the innovation
of meaning requires another hermeneutics.
A DIALECTICAL REEXAMINATION OF THE PROBLEM OF SUBLIMATION
WORK_OF_ART
AND
THE CULTURAL OBJECT
PRODUCT
I now wish to show, in a very precise example, how a dialectical exegesis may be applied to symbols
30
PRODUCT
.
GW
ORG
,
13
CARDINAL
,
142
CARDINAL
; SE,
18
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
.
belonging to the
third
ORDINAL
cycle of man’s
Suchen
PERSON
. I will take this example from the esthetic sphere, where
Freud
ORG
’s interpretation is less reductive than it is in the sphere of
religious symbolism. It is here that the profound identity of the
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics, regressive and progressive, may be shown most clearly and
forcefully. It is here that the teleology of consciousness will appear
in the detailed structure of the archeology itself, and the telos of the
human adventure will be foreshadowed in the endless exegesis of the
myths and hidden secrets of our childhood and birth.
This privileged example, this prototypic example, will be Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
. The tragedy is built around a fantasy well known to the interpretation
of dreams, the fantasy in which we live through the childhood drama
that we call oedipal. In this sense, we may say with
Freud
ORG
that there is nothing more behind the work of art created by
Sophocles
ORG
than a dream. From the start
Freud
ORG
rejects the classical interpretation of
the Oedipus Rex
PRODUCT
as a tragedy of destiny, whose effect lies in the contrast between the
omnipotence of the gods and the vain efforts of mankind to escape the
evil that threatens them. This type of conflict, he thinks, no longer
affects a modem audience, whereas spectators are still moved by
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
. What moves us is not the conflict between destiny and human will, but
the particular nature of this destiny, which we recognize without
knowing it: “His destiny moves us only because it might have been
ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as
upon him.” ;
11
CARDINAL
Freud
ORG
compares the legend and the drama with dreams of incest and parricide.
King Oedipus, who slew his father
Lai'us
PERSON
and married his mother
Jocasta
ORG
, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. . . .
Here is one in whom these primeval wishes of our childhood have been
fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the
repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down
within us.
Just as these typical dreams are accompanied by
feelings of repulsion whereby we comply with the censorship and make the
dream content admissible to consciousness, “so too,” says
Freud
ORG
, “the leg-
34.
The Interpretation of Dreams
ORG
,
GW
PERSON
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
262
CARDINAL
.
end must include horror and self-punishment.” Thus the
famous tragic phobos would express merely the violence of our own
repression against the revival of those childhood wishes. As for the
theological interpretation concerning the conflict between
Providence
GPE
and human freedom,
Freud
ORG
casually attributes it to “a misconceived
secondary
ORDINAL
revision of the material.”
At this point I would like to counter with a
second
ORDINAL
interpretation, which is in fact contained in the preceding one by reason of the overdetermination of the
Oedipus
PERSON
symbol. This interpretation no longer concerns the drama of incest and
parricide, a drama that has already taken place when the tragedy begins,
but rather the tragedy of truth. It appears that
Sophocles’
GPE
creation does not aim at reviving the
Oedipus
LOC
complex in the minds of the spectators; on the basis of a
first
ORDINAL
drama, the drama of incest and parricide,
Sophocles
ORG
has created a
second
ORDINAL
, the tragedy of self-consciousness, of selfrecognition. Thus Oedipus enters into a
second
ORDINAL
guilt, an adult guilt, expressed in the hero’s arrogance and anger. At
the beginning of the play Oedipus calls down curses upon the unknown
person responsible for the plague, but he excludes the possibility that
that person might in fact be himself. The entire drama consists in the
resistance and ultimate collapse of this presumption. Oedipus must be
broken in his pride through suffering; this presumption is no longer the
culpable desire of the child, but the pride of the king; the tragedy is
not the tragedy of Oedipus the child, but of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
. By reason of this impure passion with respect to the truth, his hubris rejoins that of
Prometheus
ORG
: what leads him to disaster is the passion for nonknowing. His guilt is
no longer in the sphere of the libido, but in that of
self-consciousness: it is man’s anger as the power of non truth. Thus
Oedipus becomes guilty precisely because of his pretension to exonerate
himself from a crime that, ethically speaking, he is not in fact guilty
of.
It is therefore possible to apply to
Sophocles’
GPE
drama what we have called an antithetic of reflection. One might illustrate this opposition between the
two
CARDINAL
dramas and between the
two
CARDINAL
kinds of guilt by saying that the initial drama, which comes within the province of
psychoanalysis, has its antagonist in the sphynx, which represents the enigma of birth—the source, according to
Freud
ORG
, of all the strange events of childhood; whereas the
second
ORDINAL
order drama, which
Freud
ORG
seems to reduce to the status of a
secondary
ORDINAL
revision, and even of a misconception—although it actually constitutes the true tragedy—has its antagonist in
Tiresias
ORG
the seer. In the language of our antithetic, the sphynx represents the
side of the unconscious, the seer the side of spirit or mind. As in the
Hegelian
NORP
dialectic, Oedipus is not the center from which the truth proceeds; a
first
ORDINAL
mastery, which is only pretension and pride, must be broken; the figure from which truth proceeds is that of the seer, which
Sophocles
ORG
describes as the “force of truth.” This figure is no longer a tragic
one; it represents and manifests the vision of the totality. The seer,
akin to the fool of
Elizabethan
LOC
tragedy, is the figure of comedy at the heart of tragedy, a figure
Oedipus will rejoin only through suffering and pain. The underlying link
between the anger of
Oedipus
LOC
and the power of truth is thus the core of the veritable tragedy. This
core is not the problem of sex, but the problem of light. The seer is
blind with respect to the eyes of the body, but he sees the truth in the
light of the mind. That is why
Oedipus
PERSON
, who sees the light of day but is blind with regard to himself, will
achieve selfconsciousness only by becoming the blind seer:
night
TIME
of the senses,
night
TIME
of the understanding,
night
TIME
of the will; nothing more to see, nothing more to love, nothing more to enjoy. “Cease being a master,”
Creon
ORG
says harshly; “you won the mastery but could not keep it to the end.”
Such is the antithetic reading of
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
; but we must now combine the
two
CARDINAL
readings in the unity of the symbol and its power to disguise and reveal. I will start with a remark of
Freud
ORG
’s which we have omitted and which concerns not the matter of the drama,
which we are told is identical with the dream material, but the manner
in which the drama unfolds. “The action of the play,” he says, “consists
in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and
ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to the work of a
psychoanalysis—that Oedipus himself is
38
CARDINAL
.
Sophocles
ORG
,
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
, verse
356
CARDINAL
.
the murderer of
Laius
GPE
, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of
Jocasta
ORG
.” <
332
CARDINAL
> But we have already seen that psychoanalysis as a therapeutic
activity, as a process of reduplicated consciousness, revives the whole
history of master and slave. Thus the analytic interpretation, inasmuch
as it is itself a struggle for recognition and hence a struggle for
truth, a movement of selfconsciousness, suggests the other drama, that
of anger and nontruth. That is why
Freud
ORG
himself is not content with saying that Oedipus “shows us the
fulfillment of our own childhood wishes”; this is the drama’s oneiric
function. He adds:
<
332
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
.
2/3
CARDINAL
,
268
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
261
CARDINAL
-62.
While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of
Oedipus
PRODUCT
, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds,
in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.
The contrast with which the closing
Chorus
FAC
leaves us confronted—
. . . Fix on Oedipus your eyes, Who
resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise. Like a star
his envied fortune mounted beaming far and wide: Now he sinks in seas of
anguish, whelmed beneath a raging tide . . .
—strikes as a
warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since our childhood have
grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes. <333>
<333>
GW
ORG
,
2/3
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
; SE,
4
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
. On the Oedipus of fantasy, myth, and tragedy, see
C. Stein
PERSON
, “
Notes
PRODUCT
sur la mort d’Oedipe: Preliminaire a une anthropologie psychanalytique,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
23
DATE
(
1959
DATE
),
735
CARDINAL
-56;
C. Levi-Strauss
PERSON
,
Anthropologie
GPE
structural (
Paris
GPE
,
Plon
GPE
,
1958
DATE
),
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
11
CARDINAL
.
Freud
FAC
did not clearly distinguish between the mere revival of childhood
wishes in dreams and the “warning,” addressed to the adult in us, upon
which the drama of truth ends. An antithetic method was required to
bring this double function of
Sophocles’
GPE
drama to the fore. It is only then that we can see the necessity of going beyond the duality.
In this connection, what is particularly striking about the symbol
created by
Sophocles
ORG
is the fact that the drama of truth centers precisely around the
mystery of birth. The oedipal situation contains all the “spiritual”
overtones developed by the process of truth: curiosity, resistance,
pride, distress, wisdom. Between the question of the father and the
question of truth a secret alliance is formed that resides in the
overdetermination of the symbol itself. The father is much more than the
father, and the question of the father is much more than an inquiry
about my own father. The father, after all, is never seen in his
fatherhood, but only conjectured. The whole power of questioning is
contained in the fantasies of this conjecture. The symbolism of
engendering embraces all the questions concerning generation, genesis,
origin, development. But if the childhood
Oedipus
PRODUCT
drama is already potentially the tragedy of truth,
Sophocles’
GPE
tragedy of truth is not superimposed upon the drama of origin, for the material of that tragedy, as
Freud
ORG
says, is the same as the dream material. The
second
ORDINAL
order tragedy belongs to the primary tragedy, as is clear from the
play’s ambiguous and overdetermined ending. The crime of Oedipus
culminates in the punishment of mutilation inflicted by the anger of
nontruth. What is punishment in the tragedy of sex is the dark night of
the senses in the final tragedy of truth. And if we return to an earlier
part of the play, we see that the king’s anger toward the seer derives
its energy from the resistance stemming from the oedipal situation and
the dissolution of the childhood complex.
The exegesis of Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
enables us now to complete the parallel analysis of sublimation and
cultural objects, which are in a sense the noematic correlates of
sublimation.
We began the dialectical interpretation of
sublimation in the spheres of having and power, where we saw the
profoundly antithetical nature of sublimation. As we said before, it is
on the basis of affects belonging to different libidinal stages that we
form the feelings and corresponding meanings that establish us in an
economic and a political order. But the example of such an exceptional
creation as
Sophocles’
GPE
tragedy reveals more than an antithetic; it reveals, in the work of art
itself, the profound unity of disguise and disclosure, inherent in the
very structure of symbols that have become cultural objects.
It
thus becomes possible to locate the oneiric and the poetic on the same
symbolic scale. The production of dreams and the creation of works of
art represent the
two
CARDINAL
ends of this scale, according to whether the predominant emphasis in
the symbolism is disguise or disclosure, distortion or revelation. By
this formula I attempt to account both for the functional unity existing
between dreams and creativity and for the difference in value that
separates a mere product of our dreams from the lasting works that
become a part of the cultural heritage of mankind. Between dreams and
artistic creativity there is a functional continuity, in the sense that
disguise and disclosure are operative in both of them, but in an inverse
proportion. That is why
Freud
ORG
is justified in moving from one to the other by a series of imperceptible transitions, as he does in
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming
ORG
.” Passing from
night
TIME
dreams to daydreams, from daydreams to play and humor, then to folklore
and legends, and finally to works of art, he attests, by this species
of increasingly closer analogy, that all creativity is involved in the
same economic function and brings about the same substitution of
satisfaction as the compromise formations of dreams and the neuroses.
But the question remains: Can an economics account for the increasing
prevalence, through the functional analogy, of a mythopoetic power that
places the oneiric in the area of creations of speech, themselves rooted
in the hierophanies of the sacred and in the symbolism of the cosmic
elements? Of this other function
Freud
ORG
recognizes only a very partial aspect, which he describes in terms of
an “esthetic incentive” and which comes down to the purely formal
pleasure produced by the artist’s technique in presenting his material.
This “incentive” or “allurement” is incorporated into the economy of
desire as a type of forepleasure: “We give the name of an incentive
bonus, or a forepleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is
offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater
pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources.” Thus
42
CARDINAL
. Cf. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
, pp.
165-67
CARDINAL
. On the relationship between the oneiric and the poetic, see
P. Luquet
PERSON
, “Ouvertures sur l’artiste et la psychanalyse; la fonction esthetique du moi,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
27
CARDINAL
(
1963
DATE
),
585
CARDINAL
-618; also the work of
La Decade de Cerisy
FAC
, Art et psychanalyse, soon to be published.
the economic framework of the explanation would reduce the entire
Kantian
NORP
analysis of the “judgment of taste” to a “hedonics.”
Freud
ORG
accounts very well for the functional unity of dreams and artistic
creation, but the qualitative difference, the difference in “aim” which
renders instincts dialectical, escapes him; this is why the question of
sublimation remains unsolved.
We thus see in what sense it is
true, and in what sense it is not true, that works of art, the lasting
and memorable creations of our days, and dreams, the fleeting and
sterile products of our nights, are psychical expressions of the same
nature. Their unity is assured by the fact that they share the same
“hyletic,” the same “matter” of desire. But their difference, which
Freud
ORG
himself describes as a “transformation of aim,” a “diversion of aim,”
“sublimation,” is bound up with the process of the figures of spirit. We
thus relate
Freud
ORG
to Plato, the Plato of the
Ion
GPE
and the
Symposium
GPE
, who posited the underlying unity of the poetic and the erotic, and who
regarded the philosophic mania or madness as belonging to the manifold
unity of all forms of enthusiasm and exaltation. Within their
intentional structure symbols have both the unity of a hyletic matter
and the qualitative diversity of aims and intentions, with the emphasis
either upon the disguising of the hyle or upon the revealing of a
further, spiritual meaning. If dreams remain a private expression lost
in the solitude of sleep, it is because they lack the mediation of the
artisan’s work that embodies the fantasy in a solid material and
communicates it to a public. This mediation of the artisan’s work and
this communication accrue only to those dreams that at the same time
carry values capable of advancing consciousness toward a new
understanding of itself. If
Michelangelo
PERSON
’s
Moses
PERSON
, Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
PERSON
, and
Shakespeare
PERSON
’s
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
are creations, they are so in proportion as they are not mere
projections of the artist’s conflicts, but also the sketch of their
solution. Because of their emphasis on disguise, dreams look more to the
past, to childhood. But in works of art the emphasis is on disclosure;
thus works of art tend to be prospective symbols of
one
CARDINAL
’s personal synthesis and of man’s future and not merely a regressive
symptom of the artist’s unresolved conflicts. The same emphasis upon
disclosure is the reason our pleasure as viewers of art is not the
simple revival, even accompanied by an
incentive bonus, of our own conflicts, but the pleasure of sharing in the work of truth that comes about through the hero.
This
approach to the intentional unity of symbols has enabled us to overcome
the remaining distance between regression and progression. From now on
regression and progression do not represent
two
CARDINAL
truly opposed processes; they are rather the abstract terms employed to designate the
two
CARDINAL
end limits of a single scale of symbolization. Are not dreams a compromise fluctuating between these
two
CARDINAL
functions, according as the neurotic aspect inclines dreams toward
repetition and archaism, or as they themselves are on the way to a
therapeutic action exercised by the self upon itself? Inversely, are
there any great symbols created by art or literature that are not rooted
in the archaism of the conflicts and dramas of our individual or
collective childhood? The most innovative figures that the artist,
writer, or thinker can produce call forth ancient energies originally
invested in archaic figures; but in activating these figures, comparable
to oneiric and neurotic symptoms, the creator reveals man’s most open
and fundamental possibilities and erects them into new symbols of the
suffering of self-consciousness.
But just as there is a scale or
gradation in the oneiric, perhaps there is also a scale in the poetic.
Surrealism shows quite well how the poetic can return to the oneiric, or
even tend to copy neurosis when esthetic creativity gives free rein to
the fantasies of obsession, organizes itself around themes of
repetition, or even regresses to automatic writing. Thus, not only would
works of art and dreams be located at the
two
CARDINAL
ends of a single scale of symbolization, but each of these kinds of
production would reconcile, according to an inverse pattern, the oneiric
and the poetic.
To overcome what remains abstract in the
opposition between regression and progression would require a study of
these concrete relations, shifts of emphasis, and inversion of roles
between the functions of disguise and disclosure. At least we have shown
that the area in which this concrete dialectic must be worked out is
that of language and its symbolic function.
Corresponding to this
dialectical structure of sublimation is a similar structure of the
“cultural objects” that are the correlates of sublimation. These objects
pertain to the
third
ORDINAL
sphere of feelings,
which we have described as the sphere of
worth or valuation. These feelings appeared to us to form a region of
meaning irreducible to a political economy and a politics. The process
in which man achieves consciousness is not restricted to relationships
between the ego and possessions, to relations of appropriation and
mutual expropriation, or of exchange, sharing, and giving; nor is it
restricted to the relations of dominance and obedience, of hierarchy and
sharing of influence. The quest for recognition also extends into a
quest for mutual esteem and approval. My existence for myself is thus
dependent on the way I am regarded by other people; the self is shaped
by the opinion and acceptance of others. This mutual constitution
through opinion is still guided by objects, but these objects are no
longer “things” in the sense of the goods, commodities, and services of
the sphere of having, nor do they have corresponding institutions as in
the sphere of power; these objects are the monuments and works of law,
art, literature, philosophy. The exploration of man’s possibilities
extends into this new kind of objectivity, the objectivity of works or
cultural objects properly so-called. Painted, sculptured, or written
works give these “images of man” the density of thingness, the stability
of reality; they make these images exist between men and among men by
embodying them in the material of stone, color, musical score, or the
written word. It is through the medium of these works or monuments that a
certain dignity of man is formed, which is the instrument and trace of a
process of reduplicated consciousness, of recognition of the self in
another self.
These works or cultural objects, however, cannot be
accounted for by a simple antithetic that would see a split between the
creative process along which man’s human development lies and the
affective material upon which the history of spirit works. The only
thing that can do justice to both an economics of culture and a
phenomenology of spirit is a dialectic based on the overdetermination of
symbols. I propose therefore that cultural phenomena should be
interpreted as the objective media in which the great enterprise of
sublimation with its double value of disguise and disclosure becomes
sedimented. Such an interpretation opens up to us the meaning of certain
synonymous expressions. Thus the term “education” designates the
movement by which man is led out of his childhood;
this movement is, in the proper sense, an “erudition” whereby man is lifted out of his archaic past; but it is also a
Bildung
PERSON
, in the
twofold
CARDINAL
sense of an edification and an emergence of the
Bilder
PERSON
or “images of man” which mark off the development of self-consciousness
and open man to what they disclose. And this education, this erudition,
this
Bildung
PERSON
function as a
second
ORDINAL
nature, for they remodel man’s
first
ORDINAL
nature. In them is realized the movement so well described by
Ravaisson
PERSON
in the limited example of habit; this movement is at the same time the
return of freedom to nature through the recapture of desire in the works
of culture. Because of the overdetermination of symbols, these works
are closely tied in with the world of our experience: it is indeed where
id was that the ego comes to be. By mobilizing all our childhood
stages, all our archaisms, by embodying itself in the oneiric, the
poetic keeps man’s cultural existence from being simply a huge artifice,
a futile “artifact,” a
Leviathan
GPE
without a nature and against nature.
FAITH AND RELIGION:
THE AMBIGUITY OF THE SACRED
WORK_OF_ART
We have returned to the threshold of our starting point: the
interpretation of religious symbolism. It must be confessed, however,
that our method of thought does not enable us to solve the question of
religious symbolism in a radical way, but serves merely to give us a
frontier view of this symbolism.
I do not wish to give the
impression that one can get at the radical origin of religious symbolism
by a gradual enlargement of reflective thought. I will not employ that
astute method of extrapolation. I flatly state that I have no way of
proving the existence of an authentic problematic of faith starting from
a phenomenology of spirit more or less taken from
Hegel
GPE
’s phenomenology; I even grant that such a problematic exceeds the
resources of a philosophy of reflection, which the foregoing dialectic
has greatly enlarged—but not to the point of making it more than a
philosophy of immanence. If there is an authentic problematic of faith,
it pertains to a new dimension which I have previously described, in a
different philosophical context, as a
“Poetics of the Will
WORK_OF_ART
,” because it concerns
the
44
PRODUCT
.
Ricoeur
ORG
, “
Nature
WORK_OF_ART
et liberte,”
Etudes
ORG
philosophiques (
1962
DATE
).
radical origin of the / will, i.e. the source of
effectiveness of the act of willing. In the context of the present work,
I describe this new dimension as a call, a kerygma, a word addressed to
me. In this sense, I am in accord with the way in which
Karl Barth
PERSON
poses the theological problem. The origin of faith lies in the
solicitation of man by the object of faith. Hence I will not employ the
ruse of extrapolating the question of the radical origin from an
archeology of the
Cogito
PERSON
, or the question of the final end from a teleology. The archeology only
points to what is already there, already posited in the
Cogito
PERSON
that posits itself; the teleology only points to an ulterior meaning
that holds the earlier meaning of the figures of spirit in suspense; but
this ulterior meaning can always be understood as spirit’s advance upon
itself, as its self-projection into a telos. Compared to this
archeology of myself and to this teleology of myself, genesis and
eschatology are Wholly Other. To be sure, I speak of the Wholly Other
only insofar as it addresses itself to me; and the kerygma, the glad
tidings, is precisely that it addresses itself to me and ceases to be
the Wholly Other. Of an absolute Wholly Other I know nothing at all. But
by its very manner of approaching, of coming, it shows itself to be
Wholly Other than the arche and the telos which I can conceptualize in
reflective thought. It shows itself as Wholly Other by annihilating its
radical otherness.
But if a problematic of faith has a different
origin, the field of its manifestation is the very one we have been
exploring. An An-selmian type of procedure, i.e. the movement from faith
to understanding, necessarily encounters a dialectic of reflection,
which it attempts to use as the instrument of its expression. This is
where the question of faith becomes a hermeneutic question, for what
annihilates itself in our flesh is the Wholly Other as logos. Thereby it
becomes an event of human speech and can be recognized only in the
movement of interpretation of this human speech. The “hermeneutic
circle” is born: to believe is to listen to the call, but to hear the
call we must interpret the message. Thus we must believe in order to
understand and understand in order to believe. <
334
CARDINAL
>
<
334
CARDINAL
>
Ricoeur
PERSON
,
La Symbolique
FAC
du mat (
Paris
GPE
,
Aubier
GPE
, I960),
Conclusion
PERSON
; tr.
Emerson Buchanan
PERSON
,
The Symbolism of Evil
ORG
(
New York
GPE
,
Harper and Row
WORK_OF_ART
,
1967
DATE
).
By thus making itself “immanent” to human speech, the Wholly
Other
becomes discernible in and through the dialectic of teleology and
archeology. Although it is completely different from any origin
assignable by reflection, the radical origin now becomes discernible in
the question of my archeology; although it is completely different from
any anticipation of myself I am capable of making, the final end becomes
recognizable through the question of my teleology. Creation and
eschatology present themselves as the horizon of my archeology and the
horizon of my teleology.
Horizon
ORG
is the metaphor for what approaches without ever becoming a possessed
object. The alpha and the omega approach reflection as the horizon of my
roots and the horizon of my intendings or aims; it is the radical of
the radical, the supreme of the supreme. This is where a phenomenology
of the sacred in the sense of
Van
NORP
der
Leuuw
PERSON
and
Eliade
GPE
, joined to a kerygmatic exegesis in the sense of
Barth
LOC
and
Bultmann
PERSON
(whom I do not regard as differing on this point) can come to the aid
of reflection and offer to meditative thought new symbolic expressions
situated at the point of rupture and suture between the Wholly Other and
our discourse.
This relationship presents itself to reflection
as a rupture. The phenomenology of the sacred is not a continuation of a
phenomenology of spirit; a teleology along
Hegelian
NORP
lines does not have as its eschaton, or final term, the sacred as
carried by myth, ritual, and belief. Of itself, this teleology aims not
at faith but at absolute knowledge; and absolute knowledge presents no
transcendence, but the reabsorption of all transcendence within a
completely mediated self-knowledge. Hence one cannot insert this
phenomenology of the sacred in place of the eschaton and within the
structure of the horizon without challenging the claim of absolute
knowledge. But if reflection cannot of itself produce the meaning
foreshadowed in this “approach” or “coming” (“
the Kingdom of God
GPE
has come near to you”) it can at least understand why it cannot close
in upon itself and achieve its proper meaning with its own resources.
The reason for this failure is the fact of evil. The area of challenge,
which will also be that of the threshold understanding, is the area of
discourse where a symbolism of evil is structured upon the successive
figures of the world of culture.
Why do we refuse to say that the “end” is absolute knowledge,
the
fulfillment of all the mediations in a whole, in a totality without
remainder? Why do we say this end is only foreshadowed, promised “by
prophecy,” to use the language of the Theologico-Political Treatise? Why
do we reassign to the sacred the place usurped by an absolute
knowledge? Why do we refuse to transform faith into gnosis? The reason,
along with others, why an absolute knowledge is impossible is the
problem of evil, the problem we previously regarded merely as our point
of departure in raising the problem of symbolism and hermeneutics. At
the end of this journey we will discover that the great symbols
concerning the nature and origin of evil are not simply one set of
symbols out of many, but are privileged symbols. It does not even
suffice to say, as we did in the “
Problematic
WORK_OF_ART
,” that a symbolism of evil is the counterpart of a symbolism of
salvation, which concerns the destiny of man. The symbols of evil teach
us something decisive about the passage from a phenomenology of spirit
to a phenomenology of the sacred. These symbols resist any reduction to a
rational knowledge; the failure of all theodicies, of all systems
concerning evil, witnesses to the failure of absolute knowledge in the
Hegelian
NORP
sense. All symbols give rise to thought, but the symbols of evil show
in an exemplary way that there is always more in myths and symbols than
in all of our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of
symbols will never become absolute knowledge. In short, the problem of
evil forces us to return from
Hegel
PERSON
to Kant—that is to say, from a dissolution of the problem of evil in
dialectic to the recognition of the emergence of evil as something
inscrutable, and hence as something that cannot be captured in a total
and absolute knowledge. Thus the symbols of evil attest to the
unsurpassable character of all symbolism; while telling us of the
failure of our existence and of our power of existing, they also declare
the failure of systems of thought that would swallow up symbols in an
absolute knowledge.
But the symbolism of evil is also a symbolism
of reconciliation. No doubt this reconciliation is given only in the
signs that are its promise. But it is a reconciliation that always
invites thought on the part of that understanding of faith I described
above as a threshold understanding. Such an understanding does not annul
its symbolic origin; it is not an understanding that allegorizes; it is
an under-
standing that thinks according to symbols. Thought, said
Nabert
PERSON
, always stands in the “approaches to justification.” I shall propose
three
CARDINAL
formulas expressing this link between evil as unjustifiable and the sacred as reconciliation—
three
CARDINAL
formulas in which I discern the lineaments of an eschatology that is
both symbolic and reasonable, prophetic and sensible. Although a
philosophy of reflection cannot actually encompass this eschatology, it
can make an approach to it at the horizon of a teleology of
consciousness.
First
ORDINAL
of all, every reconciliation is looked for “in spite
of”—in
DATE
spite of evil. This “in spite of,” this “nevertheless,” this “even so,” constitutes the
first
ORDINAL
category of hope, the category of confidence. But there is no proof of
this “in spite of,” but only signs; the area in which this category
operates is not a logic but a history, and one that must constantly be
deciphered in the sign of a promise, a glad tidings, a kerygma.
Next
ORG
, this “in spite of” is a “thanks to”: out of evil the principle of
things brings good. The final confidence is also hidden instruction:
etiam peccata, says
St. Augustine
PERSON
, as an inscription, as it were, to the Satin Slipper. “The worst is not always sure,” replies
Claudel
PERSON
; and he adds, in citing the
Portuguese
NORP
proverb, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” But there is no
absolute knowledge of the “in spite of,” nor of the “thinks to.” Still
less is there an absolute knowledge of the
third
ORDINAL
category of this reasonable history: “Where sin abounds, grace superabounds,” says
St. Paul
PERSON
; this strange law of superabundance, expressed in the “much more,” the ttoXX&j
paXXov
DATE
of the apostle, encompasses and enrolls the “in spite of” and the
“thanks to.” But this “a fortiori” or “much more” is not convertible
into knowledge; that which in the old theodicy was only an expedient of
false knowledge, modestly becomes the understanding of hope. “In spite
of,” “thanks to,” “much more”— these are the highest rational symbols
the eschatology engenders by means of this threshold understanding.
I
am not unaware of the fragility of this relationship, in a philosophy
of reflection, between the figures of spirit and the symbols of the
sacred. From the viewpoint of the philosophy of reflection, which is a
philosophy of immanence, the symbols of the sacred appear only as
cultural factors mixed in with the figures of spirit. But at the same
time these symbols designate the impact on culture of a reality that the
movement of culture does not contain; they speak of the Wholly Other,
of the Wholly Other than all of history; in this way they exercise an
attraction and a call upon the entire series of the figures of culture.
This is the sense in which I spoke of a prophecy or an eschatology. It
is solely through its relation to the immanent teleology of the figures
of culture that the sacred concerns this philosophy; the sacred is its
eschatology; it is the horizon that reflection does not comprehend, does
not encompass, but can only salute as that which quietly presents
itself from afar. Thus another dependence of the
Cogito
PERSON
or self is revealed, a dependence that is
first
ORDINAL
seen not in the symbol of its birth but in the symbol of an eschaton,
an ultimate, toward which the figures of spirit point. The
Cogito
PERSON
’s dependence on the ultimate, just as its dependence on its birth, its nature, its desire, is revealed only through symbols.
I
now wish to show how this hermeneutics, always in a hazardous position
in a reflective philosophy because of its horizon-function, can enter
into debate with the psychoanalysis of religion with its strong emphasis
on demystification. The danger here is of falling back on a purely
antithetical conception of hermeneutics where we would lose the benefit
of our painstaking dialectic and succumb to an eclecticism we have
consistently tried to eradicate. Hence it is important to show that a
problematic of faith necessarily implies a hermeneutics of
demystification.
I shall start with the function of horizon that
we have attributed to the alpha and omega in relation to any purely
immanent field of reflection. It seems that such a horizon, by a kind of
diabolic conversion, inevitably tends to become transformed into an
object. Kant was the
first
ORDINAL
to teach us to regard illusion as a necessary structure of thought about the unconditioned. The transcendental
Schein
GPE
is not a mere error, a pure accident in the history of thought; it is a
necessary illusion. In my opinion this is the radical origin of every
“false consciousness,” the source of every problematic of illusion,
beyond the social lies, the vital lies, the return of the repressed.
Marx
PERSON
,
Freud
PERSON
, and
Nietzsche
ORG
are already operating at the level of secondary and derived forms of
illusion; that is why their problematics are partial and rival. The same
may be said of
Feuerbach
PERSON
: the movement by which man empties himself into transcendence is
secondary as compared to the movement by which he grasps hold of the
Wholly Other in order to objectify it and make use of it; the reason man
projects himself into the Wholly Other is to grasp hold of it and thus
fill the emptiness of his unawareness.
This objectifying process
is the origin both of metaphysics and of religion: metaphysics makes
God into a supreme being; and religion treats the sacred as a new sphere
of objects, institutions, and powers within the world of immanence—of
objective spirit—and alongside the objects, institutions, and powers of
the economic, political, and cultural spheres. We may say that a
fourth
ORDINAL
sphere of objects has arisen within the human sphere of spirit.
Henceforward
PERSON
there are sacred objects and not merely signs of the sacred; sacred objects in addition to the world of culture.
This
diabolic transformation makes religion the reification and alienation
of faith; by thus entering the sphere of illusion, religion becomes
vulnerable to the blows of a reductive hermeneutics. In
our day
DATE
this reductive hermeneutics is no longer a private affair; it has
become a public process, a cultural phenomenon; whether we call it
demythologization, when it occurs within a given religion, or
demystification, when it proceeds from without, the aim is the same: the
death of the metaphysical and religious object. Freudianism is
one
CARDINAL
of the roads to this death.
It seems to me, however, that this
cultural movement cannot and must not remain external to the restoration
of the signs of the Wholly Other in their authentic function as
sentinels of the horizon.
Today
DATE
we can no longer hear and read the signs of the approach of the Wholly
Other except through the merciless exercise of reductive hermeneutics;
such is our helplessness and perhaps our good fortune and joy. Faith is
that region of the symbolic where the horizon-function is constantly
being reduced to the object-function; thus arise idols, the religious
figures of that same illusion which in metaphysics engenders the
concepts of a supreme being,
first
ORDINAL
substance, absolute thought. An idol is the reification of the horizon
into a thing, the fall of the sign into a supernatural and supracultural
object.
Thus there is a never-ending task of distinguishing
between the faith of religion—faith in the Wholly Other which draws
near— and belief in the religious object, which becomes another object
of our culture and thus a part of our own sphere. The sacred, as
signifying separation or otherness, is the area of this combat. The
sacred can be the sign of that which does not belong to us, the sign of
the Wholly Other; it can also be a sphere of separate objects within our
human world of culture and alongside the sphere of the profane. The
sacred can be the meaningful bearer of what we described as the
structure of horizon peculiar to the Wholly Other which draws near, or
it can be the idolatrous reality to which we assign a separate place in
our culture, thus giving rise to religious alienation. The ambiguity is
inevitable: for if the Wholly Other draws near, it does so in the signs
of the sacred; but symbols soon turn into idols. Thus the cultural
object of our human sphere is split in
two, half
DATE
becoming profane,
the other half
CARDINAL
sacred: the wood carver, says the prophet, cuts down a cedar, or a cypress, or an oak:
Half
of it he burns in the fire; over the half he eats flesh, he roasts meat
and is satisfied; also he warms himself and says, “Aha, I am warm, I
have seen the fire!” And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol;
and falls down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Deliver
me, for thou art my god!” They know not, nor do they understand . . . (
Isaiah 44:16-18
PERSON
).
Thus the idols must die—so that symbols may live.
THE
VALUE
ORG
AND LIMITS OF
A PSYCHOANALYSIS OF RELIGION
WORK_OF_ART
The fact that a destructive hermeneutics is justified according to the
requirements of faith itself does not imply an acceptance in toto of the
psychoanalysis of religion within the framework thus outlined. On the
contrary, we must once more come to grips with
Freud
ORG
, we must confront his hermeneutics with the hermeneutics of
Eliade
GPE
,
Van
NORP
der
Leuuw
PERSON
,
Barth
GPE
, and
Bult
PERSON
-mann, in order to construct what we can say positively and negatively about the psychoanalysis of religion.
BOOK
111
CARDINAL
. DIALECTIC
Religion and Instincts
ORG
. I see
three
CARDINAL
successive focal points of discussion. The
first
ORDINAL
concerns the instinctual substrate of religion. It has been said that “the gods were created through fear.”
Freud
ORG
repeats this remark with the fresh resources of analysis and amends it:
through fear and desire. Everything he says about the analogy between
religion and neurosis is located on this
first
ORDINAL
level of the discussion. Indeed, everything that relates religion to
neurosis, also relates it to desire by virtue of the substitute
satisfaction attaching to symptoms.
We recall that
Freud
ORG
’s point of departure was the parallel between the phenomena of
religious practices and the rituals of obsessional neurosis; this
parallel on the purely descriptive and clinical plane enabled him to
describe religion as the “universal obsessional neurosis of mankind.”
From the paper of
1907
DATE
to
Moses and Monotheism
WORK_OF_ART
in
1939
DATE
, the analogy was constantly extended and reinforced. Thus it is on the model of paranoia that
Totem and Taboo
ORG
conceives of the projection, at the narcissistic stage of the libido,
of the omnipotence of desire into figures of the divine. Religion is
regarded as the refuge of all the individual’s repressed wishes—hatred,
jealousy, urge to persecute and destroy—which the ecclesiastical
institution enables the individual to direct toward the enemies of his
religious group. But
Freud
ORG
is no doubt more instructive when he treats religion less as a support
of prohibitions than as a function of consolation. This is where the
relationship between religion and desire is most evident. Everything
centers around the paternal nucleus, the longing for the father.
Religion is grounded biologically in the condition of dependency and
helplessness peculiar to human childhood. The neurosis that now serves
as the point of reference is the one through which the child passes and
which is subsequently revived in the adult after a period of latency. So
too, religion is the revival of a distressing memory, which the
ethnological explanation proceeds to link with a primal killing that
would be to primeval mankind what the
Oedipus
LOC
complex is to the childhood of the individual.
If for the moment we leave aside the ethnological explanation, <
335
CARDINAL
> which allows
Freud
ORG
to move from a descriptive analogy to a structural identity, there remains the analogy with the
three
CARDINAL
basic stages of the childhood condition: neurotic phase, latency period, return of the repressed.
<
335
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
.
Cf
PERSON
.
R. Held
PERSON
, “Contribution a l’etude psychanalytique du phenomene religieux,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
27
CARDINAL
(
1962
DATE
),
211
CARDINAL
-66.
At this
first
ORDINAL
level of the discussion it seems to me important to maintain the purely
analogical character of the relationship between religious phenomena
and pathological phenomena against any dogmatic reduction to identity,
and to reflect upon the conditions of this analogy. Such a procedure
does not enable us to escape the
Freudian
NORP
critique but actually exposes us to its strongest point. So fragile are the ethnology of
Totem
GPE
and
Taboo
PERSON
and the scriptural science of
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism that if one is too quick to combine the sociological
argument, which claims to furnish the reason for the identity, with the
clinical description on which the analogical considerations are based,
one
CARDINAL
only weakens
Freud
ORG
’s thesis. It is better to do without the “historical” support of the
primal crime and remain on the level of the analogy between the economy
of religious phenomena and that of the neuroses, leaving the question of
the fantasy of the primal crime for further discussion.
It seems
to me that the meaning of this analogy remains and must remain
indefinite. All that can be said is that man is capable of neurosis as
he is capable of religion, and vice versa. The same causes—life’s
hardship, the triple suffering dealt the individual by nature, his body,
and other men—give rise to similar responses— neurotic ceremonials and
religious ceremonials, demand for consolation and appeal to
Providence
GPE
—and obtain comparable effects —compromise formations, secondary gain of
illness and discharge of guilt, substitute satisfaction.
But
what does the analogy mean? Psychoanalysis as such cannot say. Analysis
does indeed throw some light on what we have called the birth of idols;
but it has no way of deciding whether that is all that faith is; whether
ritual is originally, in its primordial function, obsessional ritual;
whether faith is merely consolation on the childhood pattern. Analysis
can reveal to the religious man his caricature, but it leaves him the
task of meditating on the possibility of not resembling his distorted
double. For it is truly a matter of distortion, and of
self-understanding through distortion: distortion of the infantile,
distortion of the neurotic, distortion of the primitive
(or of the so-called primitive person, himself interpreted as the analogue of the neurotic and the child).
The
value of the analogy, and hence also the limits of the analogy, seem to
me to hinge on a crucial point: does the affective dynamism of
religious belief have the wherewithal to overcome its own archaism? This
question can receive only a partial answer in the context of an
investigation of the instinctual substrate of religion; it is a question
that necessarily relates to the question of the fantasy of the primal
killing and more generally of the meaning of the father complex. But
even within our present limited framework we can go rather far by
critically reexamining what we described in our “
Analytic
NORP
” as the absence of history in religion.
For
Freud
ORG
, religion is the monotonous repetition of its own origins. It is a
sempiternal treading on the grounds of its own archaism. The theme of
“the return of the repressed” means nothing else: the
Christian
NORP
Eucharist repeats the totem meal, as the death of Christ repeats that of the prophet
Moses
PRODUCT
, which repeats the original killing of the father.
Freud
ORG
’s exclusive attention to repetition becomes a refusal to consider a
possible epigenesis of religious feeling, that is to say, a
transformation or conversion of desire and fear. This refusal does not
seem to me to be based upon analysis, but merely expresses
Freud
ORG
’s personal unbelief.
In reading
Freud
ORG
’s works, one may observe this paring down of religious feeling whenever
such feeling is about to go beyond the bounds in which it has been
confined. For instance, there is an entire pre-oedipal stratum which is
glimpsed, then obliterated.
Freud
ORG
touches on it in the
Leonardo
GPE
, when he compares the vulture fantasy to the
Egyptian
NORP
goddess
Mut
PERSON
, pictured as a vulture-headed mother deity with a phallus. For a moment
Freud
ORG
glimpses the rich meaning of this representation, but he immediately reduces its scope by explaining
Leonardo
GPE
’s childhood fantasy and the representation of the androgynous deities
in terms of the infantile sexual theory of the maternal penis. Later we
shall discuss the sense in which one and the same representation may be
regarded as the common source of both a regressive fantasy and a figure
of the sacred. For the present let us keep in mind that there are other
affective roots besides the father complex. In contrasting “the primeval
days of the human race” with our civilized attitude of depreciating
sexuality,
Freud
ORG
himself suggests that primitive men divinized sexuality, and that all
other human activities were made to share in its divine nature through
transfer of the sexual to the non-sexual. Later on
Freud
ORG
will admit that he does not know what place to assign to the feminine deities in his genesis of religious illusion.
Is this not an indication of a possible religion of life, a religion of love? On
at least two
CARDINAL
occasions
Freud
ORG
touched upon this working hypothesis, only to brush it aside immediately. In the famous myth of the primal murder,
Freud
ORG
encounters an episode that remains unexplained, although it is
ultimately the pivot of the drama: this episode is the forming of the
covenant among the brothers whereby they agreed not to repeat among
themselves the murder of the father. This covenant is highly
significant, for it puts an end to a repetition of the act of parricade;
by prohibiting fratricide, the covenant engenders a history. But
Freud
ORG
is much more preoccupied with the symbolic repetition of the murder in
the totem meal than with the conciliation among the brothers, which
makes possible the reconciliation with the father image henceforward
engraved in the hearts of men. Why not link the destiny of faith with
this fraternal conciliation, rather than with the perpetual repetition
of the parricide? But
Freud
ORG
has decided that the son religion is not a true advance beyond the
father complex: the fiction that the son is the leader of the revolt,
and hence a murderer figure, immediately closes the
half
CARDINAL
-opened door.
A similar difficulty faces the
second
ORDINAL
essay of
Moses and Monotheism
WORK_OF_ART
. “If
Moses
PERSON
was an
Egyptian
NORP
,” he must have taken his ethical god from a religion that was already
established. But the cult of Aten, which we are told was built on the
model of the benevolent prince Akhenaten, poses the great enigma of a
“political” god, by which I mean a god who founds the social covenant
and who consequently arises on the substrate of desire and fear and is
more closely connected with the conciliation among the brothers than
with the murder of the father.
But it is especially the final
theory of instincts that might have been the occasion for a fresh
investigation of the phenomenon of religion. <
336
CARDINAL
> Such an investigation did not occur. On the contrary, this was the period when
Freud
ORG
hardened his hostility toward religion and was preparing to write
The Future of an Illusion
ORG
. Nevertheless, by contrasting
Eros
PERSON
with death,
Freud
ORG
recaptured a certain mythical basis preserved by the
German
NORP
romantic tradition; through the latter he was able to go back to
Plato and Empedocles
GPE
and describe
Eros
LOC
as “the power which holds everything together.” But he never suspected that this mythology of
Eros
LOC
might concern an epigenesis of religious feeling, nor that
Eros
NORP
might be another name for the Johannine God, and further back, for the Deuter-onomic God, and further still, for the God of
Osee
PERSON
, when the prophet celebrates in his songs the betrothal in the desert.
And why may it not be that “our god Logos, who promises no consolation,
whose voice is soft but does not rest till it has gained a hearing,”
is—in spite of
Freud
ORG
’s ironic tone on this occasion—another name for
Eros
LOC
, in the profound unity of the symbols of
Life and Light
WORK_OF_ART
?
Freud
ORG
seems to me to exclude without reason, I mean without any
psychoanalytic reason, the possibility that faith is a participation in
the source of
Eros
LOC
and thus concerns, not the consolation of the child in us, but the
power of loving; he excludes the possibility that faith aims at making
this power adult in the face of the hatred within us and outside of
us—in the face of death. The only thing that can escape
Freud
ORG
’s critique is faith as the kerygma of love: “God so loved the world. . .
.” But in return his critique can help me discern what this kerygma of
love excludes—a penal
Christol
ORG
-ogy and a moral God—and what it implies—a certain coincidence of the tragic God of Job and the lyric God of
John
PERSON
.
<
336
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part III,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
3
CARDINAL
. Cf.
F. Pasche
PERSON
, “
Freud
ORG
et 1’orthodoxie judeo-chretienne,” Rev. fr. de psychan.,
25
CARDINAL
(1961),
55-88
DATE
;
A. Vergote
PERSON
, “
La
PERSON
religion du pere face a la raison et a la necessite,”
La Psychanalyse
WORK_OF_ART
, science
de Vhomme
PERSON
, pp.
223
CARDINAL
-57.
Religion and
Fantasy
ORG
. The question of the nonregressive, nonarchaizing sources of religion
leads to a critical examination of the representational nucleus that
Freud
ORG
thinks he has delimited by the convergent paths of clinical description
and ethnology: the fantasy of the killing of the father. For
Freud
PERSON
, the return of the repressed is both the return of the affects of fear
and love, anxiety and consolation, and the return of the fantasy itself
in the substitute figure of god. This substitute figure is the remote
derivative of the representations attaching to the instinctual
substrate. Consequently, all our remarks about a possible epigenesis of
religious feeling become meaningful only through the mediation of an
epigenesis at the level of representations.
This epigenesis, however, is simply ruled out in
Freudianism
ORG
because of the status accorded to the fantasy of the murder of the primal father. An essential element of the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation is that this murder actually occurred in the past either
once or several times, and that there exists an actual memory of it
inscribed in the hereditary patrimony of mankind. The
Oedipus
LOC
complex of the individual is too brief and too indistinct to engender
the gods; without an ancestral crime as part of our phylogenetic past,
the longing for the father is unintelligible; the father is not my
father. Through the course of
the years
DATE
,
Freud
ORG
kept reinforcing the notion that the memory of the primal killing is a
memory of a real event. The most explicit statements in this regard are
those in
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism, which we have cited at length in
the “Analytic.
WORK_OF_ART
” If then, for
Freud
ORG
, religion is archaic and repetitive, it is to a great extent because
religion is drawn backward by the remembrance of a murder that belongs
to its prehistory and constitutes what
Moses
ORG
and Monotheism calls “the truth in religion.” The truth resides in
memory: whatever is added by the imagination is, as in dreams,
distortion; whatever is added by rational thought is, again as in
dreams, secondary elaboration, rationalization, and superstition. Thus
Freud
ORG
deliberately turns his back on the demythologizing interpretations which, from
Schelling
GPE
to
Bultmann
PERSON
, deprive myths of any etiological function so as to restore to them
their mytho-poetic function capable of leading to a reflection or a
speculation.
It is strange to note that in order to explain religion
Freud
ORG
held onto a conception he was forced to abandon in the theory of the neuroses. We recall that the true interpretation of the
Oedipus
LOC
complex was achieved in opposition to the erroneous theory of the real
seduction of the child by an adult. Unfortunately, the Oedipus episode,
which
Freud
ORG
discovered by a sort of reversal of meaning of the seduction scene, was substituted in its place; the
Oedipus
LOC
complex was made the trace or vestige of a real memory (this vestigial function, we recall, is what enabled
Freud
ORG
in Chapter 7 of
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
to equate formal regression with the quasi-hallucinatory revival of a memory trace). Even more than the individual
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex, the collective complex of mankind is regarded as the return of a vestigial type of affect and representation.
Freud
ORG
himself, however, furnishes the means of picturing the matter in another way. There is in
Freud
ORG
a conception of the “primal scene” in which the notion of a
nonvestigial function of imagination is sketched. The “scene with the
vulture,”
Freud
ORG
notes in the
Leonardo
GPE
, “would not be a memory of
Leonardo
GPE
’s but a fantasy, which he formed at a later date and transposed to his childhood.”
Freud
ORG
illustrates this by a comparison with the way in which the writing of
history might have originated among the peoples of antiquity, when men
entered an “age of reflection” and
felt a need to learn where
they had come from and how they had developed. . . . Historical writing,
which had begun to keep a continuous record of the present, now also
cast a glance back to the past, gathered traditions and legends,
interpreted the traces of antiquity that survived in customs and usages,
and in this way created a history of the past. <
337
CARDINAL
>
ORG
<
337
CARDINAL
>
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of his
Childhood
ORG
,
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
151
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
83-84
DATE
. In a footnote added in
1919
DATE
(ibid., n.
2
CARDINAL
),
Freud
ORG
replies to
Havelock Ellis
PERSON
, who, in a favorable review (
1910
DATE
) of the
Leonardo
GPE
, objected that the memory of
Leonardo
GPE
’s may very well have had a basis of reality.
Freud
ORG
continues to emphasize the fantasy character of the vulture scene: even
if the scene arose from memories of a real event, the fantasy
transfigured this “real event of no importance” (die reale Nichtigkeit).
This
“history of a nation’s earliest days, which was compiled later and for
tendentious reasons” <338>—does it not imply a creation of
meaning, capable of marking off and carrying what we have called an
epigenesis of religious feeling?
May
DATE
not such a primal scene fantasy supply the
first
ORDINAL
layer of meaning to an imagination of origins which is increasingly
detached from its function of infantile and quasi-neurotic repetition,
and increasingly of service to an investigation of the fundamental
meanings of human destiny?
<
338
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
152
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
84
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
encountered this nonvestigial product of imagination, this carrier of a
new meaning, not when he spoke of religion but when he spoke of art.
Let us recall our exegesis of the
Gioconda
PRODUCT
’s smile. The memory of the lost mother, we said, is recreated by the
work of art; it is not something that lies hidden underneath, like a
real stratum that is merely covered over; strictly speaking, it is a
creation, and exists only insofar as it is presented in the painting.
<
339
CARDINAL
>
<
339
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Analytic
NORP
,” Part II,
Ch
LANGUAGE
.
1
CARDINAL
.
Hence
one
CARDINAL
and the same fantasy can carry
two
CARDINAL
opposed vectors: a regressive vector which subjects the fantasy to the
past, and a progressive vector which makes it an indicator of meaning.
That the regressive and progressive functions can coexist in the same
fantasy is intelligible in
Freudian
NORP
terms.
Leonardo
GPE
’s vulture fantasy is a
first
ORDINAL
transfiguration of the vestiges of the past; a fortiori, a true work of art like the
Gioconda
PRODUCT
is a creation in which, in
Freud
ORG
’s own words, the past is “denied and overcome.” <
340
CARDINAL
>
<
340
CARDINAL
>
Cf
PERSON
. above, p.
173
CARDINAL
.
Freud
ORG
admits, however, that he does not understand this creative function:
“Since artistic talent and capacity are intimately connected with
sublimation we must admit that the nature of the artistic function is
also inaccessible to us along psychoanalytic lines.” <
341
CARDINAL
> Let us apply this remark to the fantasy of the primal crime.
Freud
ORG
writes in the
Leonardo
GPE
:
<
341
CARDINAL
>
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
209
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
136
CARDINAL
.
Psychoanalysis
PRODUCT
has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father
complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is,
psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father . . . The almighty
and just God, and kindly
Nature
NORP
, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather as
revivals and restorations of the young child’s ideas of them. <
342
CARDINAL
>
<
342
CARDINAL
>
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
195
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
.
Why should not this sublimation of the father involve the same
ambiguity, the same double value of oneiric revival and cultural
creation? Such must be the case, in a certain sense, even within the
framework of
Freud
ORG
’s interpretation, if religion is to fulfill its universal and not just its individual function—if it is to acquire cul-
tural
importance and assume a function of protection, consolation,
reconciliation. But then is it possible that the father figure, as
presented by religion and faith, is merely a picture puzzle, hidden in
the believer’s invocation like
Leonardo
GPE
’s vulture in the folds of the Virgin’s robe? To my mind one cannot
treat the father figure as an isolated figure with its own special
exegesis; it is simply
one
CARDINAL
component—the central
one
CARDINAL
, it is true, as we shall say further on—in a mytho-poetic constellation which must
first
ORDINAL
be considered as a whole.
Let us explore the following path. The
force of a religious symbol lies in the fact that it recaptures a
primal scene fantasy and transforms it into an instrument of discovery
and exploration of origins. Through these “detector” representations,
man tells the origin of his humanity. Thus the accounts of battle in
Hesiod and the
Babylonian
NORP
literature, the accounts of fall in the
Orphic
NORP
literature, the accounts of primal guilt and exile in the
Hebraic
GPE
literature, <
343
CARDINAL
> may indeed be treated, in the manner of
Otto Rank
PERSON
, as a sort of collective oneirism, but this oneirism is not a recording
of prehistory. Rather, through their vestigial function, such symbols
show in operation an imagination of origins, which may be said to be
historial, geschichtlich, for it tells of an advent, a coming to being,
but not historical, historisch, for it has no chronological
significance. To use
Husserlian
NORP
terminology, I will say that the fantasies explored by
Freud
ORG
make up the hyletic of this mytho-poetic imagination. It is in and
through certain primal scene fantasies that man “forms,” “interprets,”
“intends” meanings of another order, meanings capable of becoming the
signs of the sacred which the philosophy of reflection can only
acknowledge and salute at the horizon of its archeology and its
teleology. This new intentionality, through which fantasies are
interpreted symbolically, arises from the very nature of the fantasies
insofar as they speak of the lost origin, of the lost archaic object, of
the lack inherent in desire; what gives rise to the endless movement of
the interpretation is not the fullness of memory but its emptiness, its
openness. Ethnology, com-
<
343
CARDINAL
>
The Symbolism of Evil
WORK_OF_ART
, Part II. On religion and fantasy, cf.
J. La-planche
PERSON
and
I. B. Pontalis
PERSON
, “Fantasme originaire, fantasme des origines, origine du fantasme,”
Les Temps modernes,
WORK_OF_ART
19
CARDINAL
(
1964
DATE
),
1833-68
DATE
.
parative mythology, biblical exegesis—all confirm that every
myth is a reinterpretation of an earlier account. These interpretations
of interpretations are quite capable therefore of operating upon
fantasies pertaining to various ages and stages of the libido. But the
important factor is not so much this “sensory matter” as the movement of
interpretation that is contained in the advancement of meaning and
constitutes the intentional transforming of the “matter.” This is the
reason why a hermeneutike techne can be applied to myths; a myth is
already hermeneia, interpretation and reinterpretation of its own roots.
And if myths assume a theological meaning, as we see in the origin
narratives, they do so through this endless process of correction, which
has become a concerted and systematic effort.
Thus the father
figure cannot be considered apart from the mytho-poetic function in
which it is inserted. It is true that this figure is particularly
dominant, since it furnishes the prototype of the deity and thus refers,
through polytheism and then monotheism, to the unique father figure.
This “projective” characteristic is found only in the father figure;
that is true. But
Freud
ORG
did not struggle with the difficulties concerning projection as he did
with those concerning introjection and identification. The displacement
of the father onto the totem animal and the totem god does not perplex
him enough. The analogy with animal phobias and with paranoia dispense
him from seeking further. Do not the same questions that we asked
concerning the mother image in
Leonardo
GPE
’s
Mona Lisa
PERSON
arise here? Is not the father figure as much “denied and overcome” as
it is “repeated”? What have I understood when I have discovered—or
divined—the father figure in the representation of the deity? Do I
understand both of them better? But I do not know what the father means.
The primal scene fantasy refers me back to an unreal father, a father
who is missing from our individual and collective history; this is the
fantasy in which I imagine God as a father. So great is my ignorance of
the father that I can say that the
55
CARDINAL
. I allude here to the
two
CARDINAL
historical roots of hermeneutics: the “hermeneutic technique” of the
interpreters of signs, dreams, and incommunicable speech, and
“interpretation” or hermeneia, which, according to
Aristotle
GPE
, is the work of meaningful discourse in general.
Cf
PERSON
. above, “
Problematic
WORK_OF_ART
,” Ch.
2
CARDINAL
.
father as a cultural theme is created by mythology on the
basis of an oneiric fantasy. I did not know what the father was until
his image had engendered the whole series of his derivatives. What
constitutes the father as an origin myth is the interpretation through
which the primal scene fantasy receives a new intention—to the point
where I can invoke “our Father, who art in heaven . . .” Stated in the
prephilosophical language of myth, the symbolism of the heavens and the
symbolism of the father make explicit the origin symbolism that the
archaic fantasy virtually contained by reason of the absence, lack,
loss, and emptiness of its proper “object.”
Why does the father
figure have a privilege that the mother figure does not have? Its
privileged status is no doubt due to its extremely rich symbolic power,
in particular its potential for “transcendence.” In symbolism, the
father figures less as a begetter equal to the mother than as the
name-giver and the lawgiver.
Freud
ORG
’s remarks about identification with a model, as distinct from libidinal
identification, are applicable here. One does not possess the father of
identification, not only because he is a lost archaic object, but
because he is distinct from every archaic object. As such, he cannot
“come back” or “return” except as a cultural theme; the father of
identification is a task for representation because from the start he is
not an object of desire but the source of institution. The father is an
unreality set apart, who, from the start, is a being of language.
Because he is the name-giver, he is the name-problem, as the
Hebrews
ORG
first
ORDINAL
conceived him. Thus the father figure was bound to have a richer and
more articulated destiny than the mother figure. Through sublimation and
identification the symbol of the father was able to join with that of
the lord and that of the heavens to form the symbolism of an ordered,
wise, and just transcendence, as outlined by
Mircea Eliade
ORG
in the
first
ORDINAL
chapter of his
Histoire
GPE
com-paree des religions.
But then the father figure is not
simply a return of the repressed; it is rather the result of a true
process of creation. This creation of meaning constitutes the true
overdetermination of authentic symbols, and this overdetermination in
turn grounds the possibility of
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics,
one
CARDINAL
of which unmasks the archaism of its fantasy content, while the other discovers the new intention that animates
the material content. The reconciliation of the
two
CARDINAL
hermeneutics lies in symbols themselves. Thus one cannot stop with an antithetic that would distinguish between “
two
CARDINAL
sources of morality and religion” for the prophecy of consciousness is not external to its archeology.
One
might even say that, thanks to their overdetermined structure, symbols
succeed in inverting the temporal signs of the origin fantasy. The
primal father signifies the eschaton, the “God who comes”; generation
signifies regeneration; birth analogously stands for rebirth; the
childhood—that childhood which is behind me— signifies the other
childhood, the “
second
ORDINAL
naivete.” The process of becoming conscious is ultimately a process of seeing
one
CARDINAL
’s childhood in front of oneself and
one
CARDINAL
’s death behind oneself: “before, you were dead . . .”; “unless you
become as little children . . .” In this interchange of birth and death,
the symbolism of the God who comes has taken over and justified the
figure of the primal father.
But if symbols are fantasies that have been denied and overcome, they are never fantasies that have been abolished. That is why
one
CARDINAL
is never certain that a given symbol of the sacred is not simply a
“return of the repressed”; or rather, it is always certain that each
symbol of the sacred is also and at the same time a revival of an
infantile and archaic symbol. The
two
CARDINAL
functions of symbol remain inseparable. The symbolic meanings closest
to theological and philosophical speculation are always involved with
some trace of an archaic myth. This close alliance of archaism and
prophecy constitutes the richness of religious symbolism; it also
constitutes its ambiguity. “Symbols give rise to thought,” but they are
also the birth of idols. That is why the critique of idols remains the
condition of the conquest of symbols.
Faith and
Speech
ORG
. It seems to me that the
two
CARDINAL
preceding discussions lead to a
third
ORDINAL
sphere of problems. After seeing the projected shadow or imprint of the
advancement of meaning in instincts and fantasies, we must consider
speech or the spoken word [/a parole], for this is the element in which
the advancement of meaning occurs. If an epigenesis of instincts and
fantasies
is possible, it is because speech is the instrument of the hermeneia or
“interpretation” that symbols exercise with respect to fantasies, even
before symbols are themselves interpreted by the exegetes.
The
ascending dialectic of affect and fantasy is thus carried by an
ascending dialectic of symbolic language. But this creation of meaning
implies that the imaginary of the mytho-poetic function is more closely
related to nascent speech than to images in the sense of a mere revival
of perception. Unfortunately, the
Freudian
NORP
conception of language is very inadequate; the meaning of words is the
revival of acoustic images; thus language itself is a “trace” of
perception. This vestigial conception of language can give no support to
an epigenesis of meaning. If it is true that the various degrees of
fantasy are developed only in the element of language, it is still
necessary to distinguish between “things heard” and “things seen.” But
things heard are
first
ORDINAL
of all things said; and things said, in myths of the origin and the
end, are the exact contrary of traces or vestiges. The things said
interpret certain primal scene fantasies in order to speak of man’s
situation in the sacred.
The inadequacy of
Freud
ORG
’s philosophy of language explains, I believe, what seems to me to be
Freud
ORG
’s greatest shortcoming in his theory of religion: he thought he could
make a direct psychology of the superego and, on this basis, a direct
psychology of belief and the believer, thus circumventing an exegesis of
the texts in and through which the religious man has “formed” and
“educated” his belief, in the sense of the
Bildung
PERSON
mentioned above. However, it is impossible to construct a
psychoanalysis of belief apart from an interpretation and understanding
of the cultural productions in which the object of belief announces
itself.
What we have said in general about the process of man’s
“becoming conscious” should be said more specifically about his
“becoming religious.” For man, to become conscious is to be drawn away
from his archaism by the series of figures that institute and constitute
him as man. Hence there can be no question of grasping the meaning of
the religious man apart from the meaning of the texts that are the
documents of his belief. Dilthey very clearly established this point in
his famous essay of
1900
DATE
, “
Die Entstehung
WORK_OF_ART
der
Hermeneutik
ORG
.” Understanding or interpretation, he says, does not
truly
begin until “life-expressions” are fixed in an objectivity that is
subject to the technical rules of an art: “We call this technical
understanding of durably fixed life-expressions an exegesis or
interpretation.” <
344
CARDINAL
> If literature is the privileged area of this process of
interpretation—though one may also legitimately speak of a hermeneutics
of sculpture and of painting— it is because language is the only
complete, exhaustive, and objectively intelligible expression of human
interiority: “That is why,” Dilthey continues, “the art of understanding
centers around the exegesis or interpretation of the written testimony
of human existence.” <
345
CARDINAL
>
<
344
CARDINAL
>
Wilhelm Dilthey
PERSON
, “
Die Entstehung
WORK_OF_ART
der
Hermeneutik
ORG
,” in
Gesam-melte
PERSON
Schriften,
5
DATE
,
319
CARDINAL
;
Fr
GPE
. trans. in
Le Monde de Vesprit
FAC
, 1 (Aubier),
321
CARDINAL
.
<
345
CARDINAL
>
Ibid
PERSON
.
There is hardly any need to state that
Moses
PERSON
and Monotheism does not operate at the level of an exegesis of
the Old Testament
LOC
and in no way satisfies the most elementary requirements of a hermeneutics adapted to a text. Consequently one cannot say that
Freud
ORG
truly made, or even began to make, an “analysis of religious representations,” whereas on the esthetic plane the “
Moses
PRODUCT
” of
Michelangelo
PERSON
is truly treated as a self-contained work and analyzed in detail, with
no concession made to a direct psychology of the artist and his creative
activity. The works of religion, the monuments of belief, are treated
neither with the same sympathy nor with the same rigor; instead, we are
presented with a vague relationship between religious themes and the
paternal prototype.
Freud
ORG
has decided once and for all that the truly religious ideas are those
that clearly stem from this prototype. A powerful being who rules over
nature as an empire, who annuls death and redresses the afflictions of
this life—if God is to be God, this is all he can be; naive religion is
religion proper. Philosophic religion and “oceanic” religion, <
346
CARDINAL
> in which the personality of God has been softened, transposed, or
abandoned, are derivatives or secondary rationalizations that refer back
to the paternal prototype.
<
346
CARDINAL
>
Civilization
PERSON
and Its
Discontents
NORP
,
Ch
PRODUCT
.
1
CARDINAL
.
I would like to show, in the case of
two
CARDINAL
particular themes central to the
Freudian
NORP
problematic—the themes of guilt and consolation— how a path that
Freud
ORG
has closed may be reopened.
The
first
ORDINAL
theme has to do with religion as the summit of an ethi-
cal view of the world; the
second
ORDINAL
concerns religion as proceeding from a suspension of the ethical. These themes are the
two
CARDINAL
focal points of religious consciousness, as
Freud
ORG
himself acknowledges by viewing religion as a form of interdiction and as a form of consolation.
Now,
Freud
ORG
had no interest whatsoever in what might be called an epigenesis of the
sense of guilt, an epigenesis that would be guided by an increasingly
refined symbolism. The sense of guilt seems to have no history beyond
the
Oedipus
LOC
complex and its dissolution. It remains a preventive procedure with respect to anticipated punishment. In the
Freudian
NORP
literature, the sense of guilt is consistently understood in this
archaic sense. But an epigenesis of guilt cannot be directly established
by a psychology of the superego; it can only be deciphered by the
indirect means of a textual exegesis of the penitential literature. In
this literature there is constituted an examplary history of conscience (
Gewissen
PERSON
). Man arrives at adult, normal, ethical guilt when he understands
himself according to the figures of this exemplary history. Elsewhere I
have tried to investigate the notions of stain, sin, and guilt by means
of an exegesis in
Dilthey
LOC
’s sense of the term.1 found that guilt progresses by crossing
two
CARDINAL
thresholds. The
first
ORDINAL
threshold is that of injustice—in the sense of the
Jewish
NORP
prophets and also of
Plato
ORG
. The fear of being unjust, the remorse for having been unjust, are no
longer taboo fears; damage to the interpersonal relationship, wrongs
done to the person of another, treated as a means and not as an end,
mean more than a feeling of a threat of castration. Thus the
consciousness of injustice marks a creation of meaning by comparison
with the fear of vengeance, the fear of being punished. The
second
ORDINAL
threshold is that of the sin of the just man, of the evil of justice
59
CARDINAL
.
The Symbolism of Evil
ORG
, Part I. See also my study, “Morale sans peche ou peche sans moralisme,”
Esprit
GPE
,
Feb. 1954
DATE
(a review of
A. Hesnard
PERSON
,
L’Univers
ORG
morbide de la faute and
Morale
ORG
sans peche). I also rejoin the remarks of
Roy S. Lee
PERSON
,
Freud and Christianity (London
ORG
,
James Clarke
PERSON
and
Co.
ORG
,
1948
DATE
;, p.
93
CARDINAL
: “Religion is more properly a function of the ego than of the unconscious and the id.” On
Freud
ORG
and guilt, see
C. Odier
PERSON
,
Les
ORG
deux sources consciente et inconsciente de la vie morale (
Neuchatel
ORG
,
La Bacon-niere
PERSON
,
1943
DATE
);
Hesnard
PERSON
,
L’Univers
ORG
morbide de la faute (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1949
DATE
) and
Morale
ORG
sans peche (
Paris
GPE
,
P. U. F.
GPE
,
1954
DATE
);
C. Nodet
PERSON
, “
Psychanalyse
NORP
et sens du peche,” Rev. fr. de Psychan.,
21
CARDINAL
(
1957
DATE
),
791
CARDINAL
-805.
proper; here consciousness discovers the radical evil affecting every maxim, even that of the good man.
All
we have said above concerning the function of fantasies is relevant
here. The myths in which the advance of consciousness is expressed are
certainly built upon primal scene fantasies subject to the anxiety of
the superego. That is why guilt is a trap, an occasion of backwardness,
of fixation in premorality, of stagnation in archaism. But the mythic
intentionality resides in the series of interpretations and
reinterpretations through which a myth rectifies its own archaic
substrate. Thus are constituted the symbols of evil which invite thought
and upon which I can form the notion of bad or servile will. Between
the sense of guilt in the psychoanalytic sense and radical evil in the
Kantian
NORP
sense there extends a series of figures in which each figure takes up the preceding one to “deny” and “overcome” it, as
Freud
ORG
says of the work of art. It would be the task of reflective thought to
show how this progressive consciousness follows the progression of the
symbolic spheres we sketched in the
first
ORDINAL
part of this chapter. The same figures that served to mark off the path
of feeling—the figures of possession, domination, and valuation—are
also the successive regions of our alienation. This is understandable,
for if these figures are the symbols of our fallibility, they are also
the symbols of our having already fallen. Freedom becomes alienated in
alienating its own mediations, economic, political, cultural. The
servile will, one might add, mediates itself by passing through all the
figures of our helplessness that express and objectify our power of
existing.
This indirect method could be the means of elaborating
the notion of noninfantile, nonarchaic, non-neurotic sources of our
guilt. But just as desire intrudes into these successive spheres and
mixes its ramifications with the nonerotic functions of the self, so too
the affective archaism of guilt extends into all the regions of
alienated possession, of unmeasured power, of vainglorious pretensions
of worth. That is why guilt remains ambiguous and suspect. In order to
break its false prestige, we must always focus on it the double
illumination of a demystifying interpretation that denounces its
archaism and a restorative interpretation that places the birth of evil
in the mind or spirit itself.
I have taken the example of guilt
as the prime example of an ambiguous notion, both archaic in origin and
susceptible of an indefinite creation of meaning. This same ambiguity is
written into the heart of religion, insofar as the symbols of salvation
are on the same level and of the same quality as the symbols of evil.
It can be shown that for all the figures of accusation there are
corresponding figures of redemption. As a result, the central figure of
religion, which psychoanalysis tells us proceeds from the prototype of
the father, cannot complete its own genesis until it has traversed all
the degrees corresponding to those of guilt. Thus the interpretation of
the father fantasy in the symbolism of God extends into all the regions
of accusation and redemption.
But if the symbolic representation
of God progresses in parallel with the symbols of evil and guilt, it is
not completed within this correlation. As
Freud
ORG
well saw, religion is more an art of bearing the hardships of life than
an indefinite exorcism of the paternal accusation. This cultural
function of consolation is what places religion no longer merely in the
sphere of fear, but in that of desire. Plato already said in the
Phaedo
GPE
that there remains in each of us an infant to be consoled. The question
is whether the function of consolation is merely infantile, or whether
there is not also what I should now call an epigenesis or ascending
dialectic of consolation.
Once again literature is the medium
that marks off the progress of this rectification of consolation. The
objection may be made that the critique of the old law of retribution, a
critique already made by the wise men of
Babylon
GPE
and even more by the books of the
Hebrews
ORG
, is not a part of religion. But then we must enter into another problematic, which
Freudianism
ORG
seems to be ignorant of, the problematic of the internal conflict between faith and religion: it is the faith of
Job
GPE
and not the religion of his friends that should be confronted with the
Freudian
NORP
iconoclasm. Does not this faith accomplish part of the task
Freud
ORG
assigns to whoever undertakes to “do without his father” (Leonardo)?
Job receives no explanation of his suffering; he is merely shown
something of the grandeur and order of the whole, without any meaning
being directly given to the finite point of view of his desire. His
faith is closer to the “
third
ORDINAL
kind” of
knowledge in
Spinoza
GPE
’s sense than to any religion of
Providence
GPE
. A path is thus opened, a path of non-narcissistic reconciliation: I
give up my point of view; I love the whole; I make ready to say: “The
intellectual love of the mind toward God is a part of that very love of
God
PERSON
whereby God loves
himself’
PERSON
(quo Deus seipsum amat). Through the
twofold
CARDINAL
test of commandment and retribution, faith brings about a single and
unique suspension of the ethical. By revealing the sin of the just man,
the man of belief goes beyond the ethics of righteousness; by losing the
immediate consolation of his narcissism, he goes beyond any ethical
view of the world.
Through this
twofold
CARDINAL
test he overcomes the father figure; but in losing it as an idol he
perhaps discovers it as a symbol. The father symbol is the surplus of
meaning intended by the seipsum of the
Spinozist
NORP
theorem. The father symbol is not a symbol of a father whom I can have;
in this respect the father is nonfather. Rather, the father symbol is
the likeness of the father in accordance with which the giving up of
desire is no longer death but love, in the sense once more of the
corollary of the
Spinozist
NORP
theorem: “The love of God toward men and the intellectual love of the mind toward God are one and the same thing.”
We
have reached a point here that seems unsurpassable. It is not a point
of repose but of tension, for it is not yet apparent how the
“personality” of God who pardons and the “impersonality” of Deus sive
natura could coincide. I only say that the
two
CARDINAL
ways of suspending the ethical,
Kierkegaard
PERSON
’s and
Spinoza
PERSON
’s, may be the same, as we are led to think by the Deus seipsum amat of
Spinoza
PERSON
and by the dialectic, underlying the whole of
Western
NORP
theology, of “God” and “deity”; but I do not know they are the same.
Starting from this extreme point, a final confrontation with
Freud
ORG
may be proposed. To the very end we must refuse having to choose between
two
CARDINAL
platitudes: that of the apologist, who would completely reject the
Freudian
NORP
iconoclasm, and that of the eclectic, who would juxtapose the
iconoclasm of religion and the symbolism of faith. For my part I will
apply, as a last and ultimate resort, the dialectic of the yes and the
no to the principle of reality. Ultimately, this is the level on which
the “epigenesis of consolation” according
60
CARDINAL
. Ethics, Part V, Proposition
36
CARDINAL
and
Corollary
PERSON
.
to faith and the “resignation to
Ananke
PERSON
” according to
Freudianism
NORP
confront and challenge one another.
I make no secret of the fact that the reading of
Freud
ORG
is what has helped me extend the critique of narcissism—which I have constantly called the false
Cogito
PERSON
, or the abortive
Cogito
PERSON
—to its most extreme consequences regarding the religious desire for consolation; the reading of
Freud
ORG
is what helped me place the “giving up of the father” at the heart of
the problematic of faith. In return I do not conceal my dissatisfaction
with the
Freudian
NORP
interpretation of the reality principle.
Freud
ORG
’s scientism prevented him from following to completion a certain path glimpsed in the
Leonardo
GPE
, even though this was the harshest book
Freud
ORG
wrote against religion.
As we have said, reality is not simply a
set of observable facts and verifiable laws; reality is also, in
psychoanalytic terms, the world of things and of men, such as that world
would appear to a human desire which has given up the pleasure
principle, that is to say, which has subordinated its point of view to
the whole. But then, I asked, is reality merely
Ananke
PERSON
? Is reality simply necessity offered to my resignation? Is it not also
possibility opened to the power of loving? This question I decipher at
my own risk—through the questions
Freud
ORG
himself raises concerning the destiny of
Leonardo
GPE
: “Quite apart from doubts about a possible transformation of the
instinct to investigate back into an enjoyment of life—a transformation
which we must take as fundamental in the tragedy of Faust—the view may
be hazarded that
Leonardo
GPE
’s development approaches
Spinoza
PERSON
’s mode of thinking.” And further on:
Lost in admiration and
filled with true humility, he all too easily forgets that he himself is a
part of those active forces and that in accordance with the scale of
his personal strength the way is open for him to try to alter a small
portion of the destined course of the world—a world in which the small
is still no less wonderful and significant than the great.
And what can be the meaning of the last lines of the
Leonardo
GPE
?
61
CARDINAL
.
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of his
Childhood
ORG
,
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
142
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
75
DATE
.
62
CARDINAL
.
GW
ORG
,
8
CARDINAL
,
143
CARDINAL
; SE,
11
DATE
,
76
DATE
.
We all still show too little respect for
Nature
WORK_OF_ART
which (in the obscure words of
Leonardo
GPE
which recall
Hamlet
ORG
’s lines) “is full of countless reasons that never enter experience.” [
La
ORG
natura e piena d’infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza.] Every one of us human beings corresponds to
one
CARDINAL
of the countless experiments in which these “ragioni” of nature force their way into experience.
I see in these lines a quiet invitation to identity reality with nature and nature with
Eros
LOC
. These “active forces,” these “countless reasons that never enter
experience,” these “countless experiments” in which those reasons “force
their way into
experience”—these
LANGUAGE
are not observed facts, but rather powers, the diversified power of
nature and life. But I cannot apprehend this power except in a mythical
symbolism of creation. Is this not the reason why the destroyers of
images, ideals, and idols end by mythicizing reality in opposition to
illusion—describing illusion as
Dionysus
ORG
, innocence of becoming, eternal return, and reality as
Ananke
PERSON
, Logos? Is not this remythicizing a sign that the discipline of reality
is nothing without the grace of imagination? that the consideration of
necessity is nothing without the evocation of possibility? Through these
questions the
Freudian
NORP
hermeneutics can be related to another hermeneutics, a hermeneutics
that deals with the mytho-poetic function and regards myths not as
fables, i.e. stories that are false, unreal, illusory, but rather as the
symbolic exploration of our relationship to beings and to Being. What
carries this mytho-poetic function is another power of language, a power
that is no longer the demand of desire, demand for protection, demand
for providence, but a call in which I leave off all demands and listen.
Thus
do I attempt to construct the yes and the no which I pronounce about
the psychoanalysis of religion. The faith of the believer cannot emerge
intact from this confrontation, but neither can the
Freudian
NORP
conception of reality. To the cleavage the yes to
Freud
ORG
introduces into the heart of the faith of believers, separating idols from symbols, there corresponds the cleavage the no to
Freud
ORG
introduces into the heart of the
Freudian
NORP
reality principle, separating mere resignation to
Ananke
PERSON
from the love of
Creation
ORG
.
63
DATE
.
GW
PERSON
,
8
CARDINAL
,
211
CARDINAL
: SE,
11
CARDINAL
,
137
CARDINAL
.
Abel
ORG
,
Karl
ORG
,
397
CARDINAL
n.
Abraham
PERSON
,
248
CARDINAL
Abraham
ORG
,
Karl
PERSON
,
100
CARDINAL
n.,
511
CARDINAL
Absence and presence. See
Fort-da
PERSON
example; Play, of children and ego,
372
CARDINAL
dialectic of,
166
CARDINAL
,
368
CARDINAL
-69,
384
CARDINAL
-86 in
the Mona Lisa
WORK_OF_ART
,
173-74
CARDINAL
,
177
CARDINAL
Absolute knowledge,
379
CARDINAL
,
388
CARDINAL
,
52628
DATE
Adam
PERSON
,
38-39
Adaptation
CARDINAL
,
351
CARDINAL
-52,
371
CARDINAL
-73
Adler
GPE
,
Alfred
PERSON
, xi,
130
CARDINAL
n.,
133
CARDINAL
,
226
CARDINAL
,
504
CARDINAL
n.
“
‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness
WORK_OF_ART
” (
Freud
ORG
),
191
CARDINAL
Claudel
PERSON
,
Paul
PERSON
,
528
CARDINAL
Cocaine
PERSON
episode,
83
DATE
n.
Co-
ORG
intended, the,
377
CARDINAL
-78,
385
CARDINAL
-
86
DATE
,
392
CARDINAL
Columbus
GPE
,
Christopher
PERSON
,
361
CARDINAL
Compromise formations,
90
CARDINAL
n. Compulsion to repeat,
285-91
CARDINAL
,
295
CARDINAL
and death instinct,
318
CARDINAL
-19 instinctual character of,
289
CARDINAL
-91
Comte
GPE
,
Auguste
GPE
,
236
CARDINAL
Conatus
NORP
,
46
DATE
,
290
CARDINAL
,
313
CARDINAL
n.,
454
CARDINAL
-56,
313
CARDINAL
n.
not equivalent to ego,
181
CARDINAL
immediate,
43
CARDINAL
-44,
54-55
DATE
,
116-17
MONEY
,
277
CARDINAL
reappropriation of,
43-48
CARDINAL
passim,
52-53
CARDINAL
,
55
DATE
,
116
CARDINAL
n.,
429
CARDINAL
,
495
CARDINAL
. See also
Becoming
ORG
conscious, process of;
Insight
ORG
, achieving of
reduplication of,
63
DATE
,
186
CARDINAL
,
466-83
CARDINAL
passim,
518
CARDINAL
,
523
CARDINAL
teleological model of,
462
CARDINAL
-68 unhappy,
463
CARDINAL
,
466
CARDINAL
Conservation of energy, principle of,
72
CARDINAL
Conservative
ORG
instincts.
See Selfpreservative instincts Constancy
ORG
principle,
69-75
CARDINAL
,
78-79
DATE
,
85-86
DATE
,
110
CARDINAL
,
112
CARDINAL
,
122
CARDINAL
-24,
144
CARDINAL
,
282
CARDINAL
-83,
318
CARDINAL
-21 and death instinct,
319
CARDINAL
equivalent to pleasure principle,
255
CARDINAL
-56
Consolation and religion,
533
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
,
545
CARDINAL
-46,
548
CARDINAL
-49 Copernicus,
N.
PERSON
,
277
CARDINAL
,
426
CARDINAL
Cordelia
PRODUCT
,
330
CARDINAL
Covenant between the brothers,
179
CARDINAL
,
206
CARDINAL
n.,
210
CARDINAL
-11,
242
CARDINAL
,
535
CARDINAL
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
ORG
(
Freud
ORG
),
165
CARDINAL
,
520
CARDINAL
Credo
PERSON
,
Christian
NORP
,
40 Creon
PERSON
,
517
CARDINAL
Critique
PERSON
of Judgment,
The (Kant)
ORG
,
38
DATE
“
Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts
ORG
and
Theories
GPE
” (
Skinner
PERSON
),
353
CARDINAL
,
364
CARDINAL
Culturalism,
373
CARDINAL
Cybernetics
ORG
,
351
CARDINAL
Dalbiez
PERSON
,
Roland
PERSON
, xii
Darwin
PERSON
,
Charles
PERSON
,
206-07
DATE
,
209
CARDINAL
,
277
CARDINAL
,
426
Death
PRODUCT
. See also Death instinct;
Tha-natos
PERSON
fear of,
329
CARDINAL
-30
resignation to,
325
CARDINAL
,
329
CARDINAL
-32,
33638
DATE
Death (continued)
ORG
symbolized by “
third
ORDINAL
woman,”
330-32
Death
WORK_OF_ART
instinct,
71
CARDINAL
,
74
DATE
n.,
86
DATE
,
156
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
,
228
CARDINAL
-29,
257
CARDINAL
-58,
262
CARDINAL
,
281
CARDINAL
-309,
336
CARDINAL
,
475
CARDINAL
and compulsion to repeat,
285
CARDINAL
-91,
295
CARDINAL
,
313
CARDINAL
,
318
CARDINAL
-19 and constancy principle,
319
CARDINAL
and destructiveness,
281
CARDINAL
,
293
CARDINAL
-99,
301
CARDINAL
-02,
313
CARDINAL
-14
and masochism,
295
CARDINAL
,
298
CARDINAL
,
451
CARDINAL
-52 and negation,
316
CARDINAL
-18 and pleasure principle,
282
CARDINAL
-89,
319-20
PRODUCT
and sadism,
295
CARDINAL
,
298
CARDINAL
-302 and superego,
298-302
CARDINAL
problematic nature of,
311
CARDINAL
-14,
317-18
QUANTITY
Decentering of consciousness. See Dispossession of consciousness
Defense
ORG
,
77
DATE
,
79-80
DATE
,
138
CARDINAL
n„
180
CARDINAL
, 28889,
349
CARDINAL
,
351
CARDINAL
n„
356
CARDINAL
Defusion of instincts,
295
CARDINAL
-99,
301
CARDINAL
,
302
CARDINAL
n„
317
CARDINAL
Deity,
207
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
,
549
CARDINAL
De Lubac.
See Lubac
ORG
,
Henri de Demons
PERSON
, belief in,
203
CARDINAL
n.,
248
CARDINAL
Demystifying
ORG
hermeneutics.
See Interpretation
ORG
, as demystification of illusions
Demythologization
ORG
,
530
CARDINAL
,
537
CARDINAL
De Saussure. See Saussure,
Ferdinand de
Descartes
PERSON
, Rene,
33
DATE
,
43-44
DATE
,
391
CARDINAL
,
454
CARDINAL
Descent of Man,
The (Darwin)
PERSON
,
206
CARDINAL
n.
and sublimation,
223
CARDINAL
,
227
CARDINAL
,
48788
DATE
,
490
Determinism
PRODUCT
,
86
CARDINAL
Deuteronomy
PERSON
,
246
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
Deutschland (Heine
ORG
),
327
CARDINAL
De Waelhens
PERSON
. See
Waelhens
PERSON
,
Alphonse de
PRODUCT
Diagnosed reality,
436-37
ORG
Dialectic
NORP
of absence and presence,
166
CARDINAL
,
368
CARDINAL
-69,
384
CARDINAL
-86
Dialectic
NORP
of desire and law,
202
CARDINAL
,
204
CARDINAL
Diatkine
GPE
,
R.
NORP
,
498
CARDINAL
n.
Diels-Kranz
PERSON
,
18 n.
TIME
“Difficulty
ORG
in
the Path of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
, A” (
Freud
ORG
),
183
CARDINAL
,
277
CARDINAL
,
426-27
QUANTITY
Dilthey,
Wilhelm
PERSON
,
363
CARDINAL
,
374
CARDINAL
,
544
CARDINAL
-46 Dionysus,
551
CARDINAL
Displacement
PERSON
, as a form of dream-work,
93-94
CARDINAL
,
96
CARDINAL
,
405
CARDINAL
Dispossession
ORG
of consciousness (see also
Epoche
ORG
in reverse),
5455
DATE
,
60
DATE
,
116
CARDINAL
n.,
127
CARDINAL
n„
13334
DATE
,
376
CARDINAL
-77,
386
PRODUCT
,
390
CARDINAL
-91,
42229
DATE
,
439
CARDINAL
-40
in
Hegelian
NORP
sense,
459-60
CARDINAL
,
462
CARDINAL
-63 “Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, The” (
Freud
ORG
),
226
CARDINAL
-28,
302
CARDINAL
,
450
CARDINAL
Domination. See also Master-slave relationship; Power as problematic of the ego,
182
CARDINAL
-86,
212
CARDINAL
,
223
CARDINAL
,
278
CARDINAL
instinct of,
285
CARDINAL
-86
Dora
PERSON
, case of,
220
CARDINAL
Dream interpretation
and morality,
204
CARDINAL
n. and projection,
203
CARDINAL
n.,
239-40
CARDINAL
,
241
CARDINAL
n„
242
CARDINAL
n. and religion,
242-43
CARDINAL
of child toward his father,
206
CARDINAL
, 224
Emotional contagion,
218
CARDINAL
,
220
CARDINAL
Empathy
GPE
,
218
CARDINAL
,
220
CARDINAL
Empedocles
GPE
,
256
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
Empirical
ORG
realism of the instinctual representatives,
432
CARDINAL
-35,
438
CARDINAL
Endeavor.
See Conatus Engels
ORG
,
Friedrich
GPE
,
74
DATE
n.
“
Entstehung
PERSON
der
Hermeneutik
PERSON
, Die” (Dilthey),
544
CARDINAL
-45
Epictetus
ORG
,
472
CARDINAL
Epiphenomenalism
ORG
,
76
DATE
Epoche
ORG
Husserlian
PERSON
,
30
DATE
,
121
CARDINAL
,
122
CARDINAL
n.,
391
CARDINAL
. See also
Reduction
ORG
, phenomenological
in phenomenology of religion,
2930
DATE
in psychoanalysis,
280
CARDINAL
Epoche
ORG
in reverse, in psychoanalysis,
117
CARDINAL
-18,
121
CARDINAL
-22,
133
CARDINAL
,
424
CARDINAL
. See also
Dispossession
ORG
of consciousness
Erikson
PERSON
,
Erik
PERSON
,
352
CARDINAL
n.,
480
CARDINAL
n.
Eros
PERSON
,
63
DATE
,
86
DATE
,
156
CARDINAL
-57,
228
CARDINAL
-29,
256
CARDINAL
,
258
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
-93,
302
CARDINAL
-09,
317
CARDINAL
,
320
CARDINAL
-21,
323
PRODUCT
,
336
CARDINAL
-38. See also
Libido
GPE
; Life instinct; Sexual instincts
and God of religion,
536
CARDINAL
and reality principle,
325
CARDINAL
,
327
CARDINAL
-28 and reality,
551
CARDINAL
in
Platonic
ORG
tradition,
46
CARDINAL
Erotogenic
ORG
zones of the body,
48587
DATE
, 511
Fates, the,
330
CARDINAL
,
332
CARDINAL
Father complex,
203
CARDINAL
,
206
CARDINAL
,
233
CARDINAL
.
252
CARDINAL
. See also
Oedipus
PERSON
complex and belief in God,
252-53, 53435
DATE
,
539
CARDINAL
Father figure
and religion,
243
CARDINAL
n.,
244
CARDINAL
-52 passim,
540
CARDINAL
-43,
548
CARDINAL
-49 and sublimation,
489
CARDINAL
and totem,
205
CARDINAL
,
210
CARDINAL
Faust,
336
CARDINAL
,
550
CARDINAL
Fechner
PERSON
,
G.
PERSON
T„
72
CARDINAL
n„
73
DATE
,
82
DATE
,
168
CARDINAL
,
255
CARDINAL
spheres of,
547
CARDINAL
Feigl
GPE
,
Herbert
PERSON
,
353
CARDINAL
n.
Ferenczi
PERSON
,
S. 100
CARDINAL
n.,
125
CARDINAL
,
206
CARDINAL
n.,
241
CARDINAL
n.
Feuerback
PERSON
,
Ludwig
ORG
,
529
CARDINAL
-
30
CARDINAL
Fichte
PRODUCT
,
J.
PERSON
,
43-45 Fink
DATE
, E„
379
CARDINAL
agnosticism,
230
CARDINAL
,
234
CARDINAL
,
545
CARDINAL
,
549
CARDINAL
ambiguous relation to
Moses
ORG
,
16970
DATE
breadth of interests,
163
CARDINAL
cultural pessimism,
161
CARDINAL
,
195
CARDINAL
his own
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex,
189
CARDINAL
n. philosophy as original aim,
86
DATE
,
155
CARDINAL
,
163
CARDINAL
,
312
CARDINAL
self-analysis,
188
CARDINAL
-90,
198
CARDINAL
,
209
CARDINAL
Freud’s Concept of Repression and Defense
ORG
(
Madison
PERSON
),
138
CARDINAL
n.,
355-57
MONEY
Fromm
GPE
,
Erich
GPE
, xi
Fulfillment
PERSON
,
Husserl
PERSON
’s notion of,
30
CARDINAL
,
92
CARDINAL
Fundamental Time
PERSON
,
29
CARDINAL
Fusion of
ORG
instincts,
295
CARDINAL
-98 Future of an
Illusion
GPE
, The (
Freud
ORG
),
35
DATE
,
234-35
DATE
,
248
CARDINAL
,
250
CARDINAL
,
252-
CARDINAL
Genealogy of Morals (
Nietzsche
ORG
),
34
CARDINAL
Genese
PERSON
et structure
de la Phenom
PERSON
-enologie de I'Esprit de Hegel (Hyppolite),
465
CARDINAL
-66
Gill
PERSON
,
Merton
PERSON
,
348
CARDINAL
n.
Gioconda
PERSON
,
La.
GPE
See
Mona Lisa God(s
PERSON
),
34
DATE
,
235
CARDINAL
,
238
CARDINAL
,
243
CARDINAL
,
245
CARDINAL
-48,
275
CARDINAL
,
528
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
-49 passim as object of metaphysics,
530
CARDINAL
origin of belief in,
198
CARDINAL
,
203
CARDINAL
n.
230
CARDINAL
,
251
CARDINAL
,
537
CARDINAL
,
539
CARDINAL
tragic, 39
Goddess
PERSON
,
172-73
MONEY
,
243
CARDINAL
,
331
CARDINAL
-32,
534
CARDINAL
Goethe
ORG
,
Johann Wolfgang
PERSON
,
86
DATE
,
163
CARDINAL
,
175
CARDINAL
,
256
CARDINAL
,
285
CARDINAL
,
313
CARDINAL
Gogh
PERSON
,
Vincent van
PERSON
,
510
CARDINAL
Golden Bough
PERSON
,
The (Frazer)
WORK_OF_ART
,
203
CARDINAL
Gradiva (Jensen
GPE
),
98
CARDINAL
,
164
CARDINAL
Greek
NORP
tragedy,
209
CARDINAL
n.
Green
PERSON
,
A.
PERSON
,
367
CARDINAL
n.,
418
CARDINAL
Gressot,
M.
NORP
,
367
CARDINAL
n.
Grillparzer
PERSON
,
Franz
ORG
,
190
CARDINAL
n.
Groddeck
PERSON
,
Georg
ORG
,
221
CARDINAL
n.,
443
CARDINAL
Group Psychology
ORG
and the
Analysis
NORP
of the Ego (Freud),
179
CARDINAL
,
201
CARDINAL
,
218
CARDINAL
-20,
224
CARDINAL
,
292
CARDINAL
,
305
CARDINAL
,
479
CARDINAL
,
512
CARDINAL
-14
Grunberger
PRODUCT
,
B.
ORG
,
407
CARDINAL
n.,
475
CARDINAL
n.
Guilt
PERSON
,
209
CARDINAL
,
298
CARDINAL
-99,
301
CARDINAL
,
306
CARDINAL
-09,
356
CARDINAL
ambiguity of,
545
CARDINAL
-48 and fear of death,
330
CARDINAL
and formation of civilization,
323
PRODUCT
and origin of religion,
242
CARDINAL
and religious practices,
232
CARDINAL
in the
Jewish
NORP
people,
245
CARDINAL
of history,
39
CARDINAL
of Oedipus,
516
CARDINAL
primal,
540
CARDINAL
taboo,
204
CARDINAL
tragic,
209
CARDINAL
n.
Haeckel
GPE
,
Ernst
GPE
,
349
Hallucination
PRODUCT
,
78
DATE
,
79
CARDINAL
n.,
80
DATE
,
82
DATE
,
105
CARDINAL
-06
Hallucinatory
GPE
character of dreams,
87
CARDINAL
n.
Hamburg
PERSON
,
C.
GPE
,
11 n.
TIME
Hamlet
WORK_OF_ART
(
Shakespeare
PERSON
),
5
CARDINAL
,
102
CARDINAL
,
190
CARDINAL
,
309
CARDINAL
,
337
CARDINAL
,
409
CARDINAL
,
496
CARDINAL
,
521
CARDINAL
,
551
CARDINAL
Hanseatic League
ORG
,
329
CARDINAL
Hartmann
ORG
,
Heinz
ORG
,
345
CARDINAL
n.,
347
CARDINAL
n.,
352
CARDINAL
,
364
CARDINAL
n.,
366
CARDINAL
n.,
368
CARDINAL
n.,
507
Hartmann
PRODUCT
,
E. von
PERSON
,
443
CARDINAL
Hate
ORG
,
126
CARDINAL
,
216
CARDINAL
,
238
CARDINAL
n„
277
CARDINAL
,
306
CARDINAL
,
492
CARDINAL
Having
PERSON
,
507-09
CARDINAL
,
511
CARDINAL
-12,
523
CARDINAL
,
547
CARDINAL
Hebraic
GPE
literature,
540
CARDINAL
Hebrews
ORG
,
542
CARDINAL
Hegel
PERSON
,
G. W. F
PERSON
„
62
CARDINAL
,
197
CARDINAL
,
211
CARDINAL
,
317
CARDINAL
,
387
CARDINAL
-88,
422
CARDINAL
,
434
CARDINAL
,
449
CARDINAL
,
46182
DATE
passim,
495
CARDINAL
,
524
CARDINAL
absolute knowledge,
379
CARDINAL
,
388
CARDINAL
,
527
CARDINAL
and language,
384
CARDINAL
master-slave dialectic,
197
CARDINAL
,
387
CARDINAL
process of figures of spirit,
46269
DATE
,
509
CARDINAL
reduplication of consciousness,
63
CARDINAL
,
186
CARDINAL
,
466
CARDINAL
-82 passim
Heidegger
PERSON
,
Martin
PERSON
,
3
DATE
,
33
CARDINAL
Heine, H.
ORG
,
327
CARDINAL
Helmholtz
PERSON
,
Hermann von
PERSON
,
72
DATE
,
86
DATE
,
255
CARDINAL
Heraclitus
PERSON
,
18
CARDINAL
Herbart
ORG
,
J. F
PERSON
„
72-73
DATE
,
87
CARDINAL
Hermeneutics. See Exegesis;
Interpretation Hesiod
PERSON
,
540
CARDINAL
Hesnard
PERSON
,
A.
PERSON
,
417
CARDINAL
,
418
CARDINAL
n.,
546
CARDINAL
n.
Histoire
GPE
comparee des religions (
Eliade
GPE
),
542
CARDINAL
Historical explanation and psychoanalysis,
362
CARDINAL
-63,
374
CARDINAL
-75
Hitler
PERSON
,
Adolf
GPE
,
338
CARDINAL
n.
Hobbes
PERSON
,
Thomas
PERSON
,
211
CARDINAL
Homosexuality
GPE
,
172
CARDINAL
,
238
CARDINAL
n.,
479
CARDINAL
,
513
CARDINAL
discussion of term,
215
CARDINAL
Idealization
ORG
,
178
DATE
,
184
CARDINAL
-85,
449
CARDINAL
-50. See also Ego ideal and religious faith contrasted,
233
CARDINAL
and sublimation contrasted,
12829
DATE
,
214
CARDINAL
,
487
CARDINAL
-92
in formation of superego,
214
CARDINAL
-15,
217
CARDINAL
within myth,
540
CARDINAL
-41,
547
CARDINAL
Interpretatio
ORG
naturae,
25
CARDINAL
Interpretation. See also
Psychoanalytic
NORP
interpretation, and historical understanding, compared; Psychoanalytic interpretation of culture and philosophical reflection,
3747
DATE
,
54-56
DATE
,
116
CARDINAL
n. and symbol,
6
CARDINAL
-9,
18-19
DATE
,
37-42 Aristotle
PERCENT
’s notion of,
20-24
DATE
,
26
CARDINAL
,
512
CARDINAL
n.,
541
CARDINAL
n.
relation of practical to critical philosophy,
44
CARDINAL
-45 self-affection,
225
CARDINAL
transcendental deduction,
375
CARDINAL
transcendental esthetic,
182
CARDINAL
transcendental illusion,
529
CARDINAL
transcendentalism,
10-11
CARDINAL
,
25
DATE
,
52
CARDINAL
Kerygma
GPE
,
525
CARDINAL
,
528
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
Khora
PERSON
,
444
CARDINAL
Kierkegaard
GPE
,
Soren
ORG
,
202
CARDINAL
,
449
CARDINAL
,
549
CARDINAL
Killing of primal father,
107
CARDINAL
n.,
179
CARDINAL
,
205
CARDINAL
,
207
CARDINAL
-10,
242
CARDINAL
-43,
245
CARDINAL
,
532
CARDINAL
-35,
537
CARDINAL
,
539
CARDINAL
as
Freudian
NORP
myth,
208-10
CARDINAL
as origin of society, moral restrictions, and religion,
207
CARDINAL
Kingdom of God
GPE
,
526
QUANTITY
King Lear (
Shakespeare
PERSON
),
330
CARDINAL
-33
Klein
PERSON
,
Melanie
PERSON
, xi
Koch
PERSON
,
Sigmund
GPE
,
348
CARDINAL
n.,
365
CARDINAL
n.,
367
CARDINAL
n.
Kohler
GPE
,
Wolfgang
GPE
,
369
CARDINAL
Komik
PERSON
und
Humor
PERSON
(
Lipps
PERSON
),
167
CARDINAL
Konvetz
GPE
,
N. R
PERSON
„
347
CARDINAL
n.
Kris
PERSON
,
Ernst
GPE
,
69
CARDINAL
n.,
71
DATE
,
74
DATE
n.,
79
CARDINAL
n.,
84
CARDINAL
n.,
347
CARDINAL
n.,
362
CARDINAL
n.
Krisis
PERSON
(
Husserl
PERSON
),
378
CARDINAL
Kroeber
GPE
,
A. L.
PERSON
,
208
CARDINAL
n.
Kubie
PERSON
,
L.
PERSON
,
347
CARDINAL
n.
Lacan
PERSON
,
Jacques
PERSON
, xi,
367
CARDINAL
n.,
395
CARDINAL
,
Lagache
ORG
,
D.
NORP
,
367
CARDINAL
n.,
407
CARDINAL
n.
Lai'us
MONEY
, King of
Thebes
GPE
,
191
CARDINAL
,
371
CARDINAL
n.,
515
CARDINAL
,
518
CARDINAL
Language. See also
Linguistic
NORP
conception of the unconscious;
Psychoanalytic
NORP
discourse, mixed structure of; Semantics of desire and faith,
543
CARDINAL
-51 and philosophy,
38
CARDINAL
,
42
DATE
and symbol,
7
CARDINAL
,
16
DATE
,
19
DATE
,
29-31
CARDINAL
compared to human sexuality,
196
CARDINAL
dialectical aspects of,
384-86
CARDINAL
hypothesis of sexual origin of,
501
CARDINAL
-02,
503
CARDINAL
n.
informative, emotive, or hortatory,
50
DATE
,
53
DATE
,
234
CARDINAL
in symbolic logic,
51
CARDINAL
ordinary,
47-51
DATE
,
126
CARDINAL
,
367
CARDINAL
phenomenology of,
383
CARDINAL
-86 problem of unity of,
3-4
DATE
,
11
DATE
,
19
DATE
,
27
DATE
,
37
DATE
,
55
DATE
Lee
PERSON
,
Roy S.
PERSON
,
546
CARDINAL
n.
Leenhardt
PERSON
,
Maurice
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
28
CARDINAL
Leeuw
GPE
,
Gerardus van der
PERSON
,
14
CARDINAL
,
2829
DATE
,
526
CARDINAL
,
531
CARDINAL
Liebniz
PERSON
,
G.
PERSON
,
135
CARDINAL
,
313
CARDINAL
n.,
429
CARDINAL
, 45557
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
,
165
CARDINAL
,
170
CARDINAL
-74,
314
CARDINAL
,
336
CARDINAL
-37,
534
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
,
55051
DATE
Leonardo da Vinci
PERSON
and a Memory of his
Childhood (Freud
WORK_OF_ART
),
164
CARDINAL
-65,
168
CARDINAL
-69,
170
CARDINAL
-76,
243
CARDINAL
,
316
CARDINAL
,
328
CARDINAL
,
336
CARDINAL
-37,
534
CARDINAL
,
53839
DATE
,
548
CARDINAL
“
Letters to Fliess
WORK_OF_ART
” (
Freud
ORG
). See
The Origins of Psychoanalysis
WORK_OF_ART
(Freud)
Levey
PERSON
,
Harry B.
PERSON
,
484
CARDINAL
n.
Levi-Strauss
PERSON
,
Claude
ORG
,
209
CARDINAL
n.,
518
CARDINAL
Levy-Valensi,
E. Amado
PERSON
,
407
CARDINAL
n.
Lewin, Kurt
ORG
,
350
CARDINAL
-51,
363
CARDINAL
,
365
CARDINAL
n.
Libido
GPE
,
71
DATE
,
84-85
DATE
,
128
CARDINAL
,
130
CARDINAL
-31,
133
CARDINAL
,
156
CARDINAL
,
171
CARDINAL
-72,
216
CARDINAL
-17. See also
Eros
NORP
; Sexual instincts replacement by
Eros
LOC
,
229
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
-92 stages of,
194-96
CARDINAL
,
271
CARDINAL
-75,
284
CARDINAL
,
298
CARDINAL
,
381
CARDINAL
,
511
CARDINAL
two
CARDINAL
concepts of,
311
CARDINAL
Lichtheim,
Ludwig
ORG
,
83
DATE
n.
Life
ORG
,
329
CARDINAL
-30,
334
CARDINAL
-35,
551
CARDINAL
and emergence of the self,
465
CARDINAL
-72 passim
Life
ORG
instinct(s),
289-95
CARDINAL
passim,
305
CARDINAL
,
309
CARDINAL
,
321
CARDINAL
,
475
CARDINAL
. See also
Eros
PERSON
; Sexual instincts
“Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy” (
Freud
ORG
),
417
CARDINAL
Linguistic conception of the unconscious,
15
CARDINAL
-16,
395
CARDINAL
-405,
45354
DATE
,
457
CARDINAL
Linguistic philosophy,
3
CARDINAL
,
11
CARDINAL
Lipps
ORG
,
Theodor
ORG
,
167
CARDINAL
,
218
CARDINAL
Little Hans, case of,
205
CARDINAL
-06,
235
CARDINAL
,
241
CARDINAL
n.,
357
CARDINAL
Locke,
John
PERSON
,
116
CARDINAL
n.
Loewenstein
PERSON
,
Rudolph
PERSON
,
347
CARDINAL
n.,
348
CARDINAL
n.
Logical
ORG
atomism,
23
CARDINAL
Logical positivism, and verification,
30
CARDINAL
Lorenz
ORG
,
Konrad
GPE
,
74
DATE
n.
Love
WORK_OF_ART
,
126
CARDINAL
,
209
CARDINAL
,
216
CARDINAL
,
238
CARDINAL
n„
277
CARDINAL
,
303
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
,
550
CARDINAL
-51. See also
Eros
Low
LAW
,
Barbara
PERSON
,
319
CARDINAL
Lubac,
Henri de
PERSON
,
24
CARDINAL
n.
Luquet
PERSON
,
P.
ORG
,
520
CARDINAL
Luther,
Martin
PERSON
,
14
DATE
,
449
CARDINAL
Macdonald
PERSON
,
Margaret
PERSON
,
359
CARDINAL
n.
MacIntyre
ORG
,
A. C.
PERSON
,
72
CARDINAL
n.,
74
CARDINAL
n.,
77
CARDINAL
n.
Madison
PERSON
,
Peter
PERSON
,
77
DATE
n.,
138
CARDINAL
n.,
35557
PRODUCT
Magic
ORG
,
237
CARDINAL
-38,
241
CARDINAL
n„
275
CARDINAL
Malebranche
GPE
,
Nicholas
PERSON
,
44
CARDINAL
Malinowski
ORG
,
B.
ORG
,
208
CARDINAL
n.
Marcus Aurelius
PERSON
,
472 Marcuse
PERSON
,
Herbert
PERSON
, xii,
457
CARDINAL
n.,
462
CARDINAL
n.
Marcuse
ORG
,
Ludwig
GPE
,
235
CARDINAL
Marduk,
39
CARDINAL
Marx
PERSON
,
Karl
PERSON
,
17
CARDINAL
,
32
CARDINAL
-35,
55
DATE
,
59-60
DATE
,
153
CARDINAL
,
529
CARDINAL
and repression,
396
CARDINAL
,
401
CARDINAL
-03 and symbolism,
504
CARDINAL
n.
Metaphysics,
530
CARDINAL
Metaphysics (
Aristotle
GPE
),
23
CARDINAL
“
Metapsychological Supplement to Theory of Dreams
ORG
” (
Freud
ORG
),
269-70
MONEY
Metonymy
GPE
, and displacement,
401
CARDINAL
,
405
CARDINAL
n.
Meyerson
PERSON
,
I.
PERSON
,
87
DATE
n.
Meynert
PERSON
,
Theodor
ORG
,
72
DATE
n.,
78
CARDINAL
n.,
263
CARDINAL
Michelangelo
PERSON
,
169
CARDINAL
,
521
CARDINAL
,
545
CARDINAL
Middle Ages
ORG
,
25
CARDINAL
Moerae
ORG
, the,
330
CARDINAL
Monadology (
Leibniz
PERSON
),
455
CARDINAL
-57 Monads,
455
CARDINAL
Mona Lisa
PERSON
,
170
CARDINAL
,
172
CARDINAL
-74,
177
CARDINAL
,
539
CARDINAL
,
541
CARDINAL
Moral
PERSON
imperative,
203-04
CARDINAL
,
449
CARDINAL
Mores
PERSON
,
179
CARDINAL
-80
Morgan, L. H.
ORG
,
200
CARDINAL
n.
Moses
PERSON
,
169
CARDINAL
-70,
534
CARDINAL
“Multatuli” (
E. D. Dekker
PERSON
),
327
CARDINAL
Mut
PERSON
,
173
CARDINAL
,
534
PRODUCT
Myth
and dreams,
5
CARDINAL
-6,
15
DATE
and interpretation,
42
DATE
,
541
CARDINAL
and language,
3
CARDINAL
and philosophic reflection,
38
CARDINAL
,
4041
DATE
and religion,
7
CARDINAL
,
275
CARDINAL
and symbolism,
14
CARDINAL
,
16
DATE
,
500-02
CARDINAL
intentionality in,
540
CARDINAL
-41,
547
CARDINAL
significance of,
551 Mythology
QUANTITY
,
Freudian
NORP
instinct theory as,
136
CARDINAL
,
311
CARDINAL
-12,
372-73
QUANTITY
Nabert,
Jean
PERSON
,
44-45
DATE
,
528
CARDINAL
Nacht, S„
367
CARDINAL
n„
407
CARDINAL
n„
498
CARDINAL
n.
Nagel
ORG
,
Ernest
ORG
,
345
CARDINAL
,
355
CARDINAL
,
373
CARDINAL
Naive realism of the unconscious,
438
CARDINAL
Narcissism
PERSON
,
128
CARDINAL
n.,
129
CARDINAL
-32 and animism,
236
CARDINAL
-38 and formation of superego,
21327
DATE
passim
ORG
and the false
Cogito
PERSON
,
213
CARDINAL
n., 42526
and the true
Cogito
PERSON
,
60
CARDINAL
as resistance to truth,
277-78, 42627
DATE
primary,
125
CARDINAL
-27,
154
CARDINAL
,
223
CARDINAL
,
277
CARDINAL
,
445
CARDINAL
-46,
489
CARDINAL
,
491
CARDINAL
. See also Id
concept of
Auslegung
GPE
,
25
CARDINAL
-26 concept of danger,
75
CARDINAL
n. concept of weakness,
182-83
CARDINAL
eternal return,
262
CARDINAL
genealogy of morals,
490
CARDINAL
will to power,
55
CARDINAL
,
313
CARDINAL
n.
Oneiric
ORG
. See
Dreams Ontogenesis
PERSON
,
179
CARDINAL
,
188
CARDINAL
,
190
CARDINAL
,
198
CARDINAL
Operational reformulation of psychoanalysis,
347
CARDINAL
,
353
CARDINAL
-59,
366
“Operational Reformulation of Some of the Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis
ORG
, An” (
A. Ellis
PERSON
),
354
CARDINAL
Operative
GPE
, distinct from thematic,
378-79
CARDINAL
,
387
CARDINAL
Operative
ORG
concepts of
Freudian
NORP
theory,
473
CARDINAL
,
477
CARDINAL
,
492
CARDINAL
Oresteia
WORK_OF_ART
(Aeschylus),
210
CARDINAL
Origen
ORG
,
505
CARDINAL
n.
Original
PERSON
sin,
246
CARDINAL
Origin myths,
38-40
DATE
,
540
CARDINAL
-43 Origins of
Psychoanalysis
FAC
, The (
Freud
ORG
),
69-85
CARDINAL
passim,
190
CARDINAL
,
329
CARDINAL
. See also “
Project”
Orphic
WORK_OF_ART
literature,
540
CARDINAL
Osee
PERSON
,
246
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
Otto
PERSON
,
Rudolf
PERSON
, 29
Outline of Psychoanalysis
PERSON
, An (
Freud
ORG
),
355 Overdetermination
MONEY
and overinterpretation,
193
CARDINAL
n. behavioristic concept of,
367
CARDINAL
of behavior,
348
CARDINAL
of dream-content,
93-94
CARDINAL
of
Michelangelo
PERSON
’s “
Moses
WORK_OF_ART
,”
169 of Oedipus symbol, 516, 519 of symbols, 19, 38, 101
WORK_OF_ART
,
341
CARDINAL
-42,
494
CARDINAL
-506,
523
CARDINAL
-24,
542
CARDINAL
-43 Overinterpretation,
193
CARDINAL
n.,
498
CARDINAL
Pain
PERSON
, distinct from unpleasure,
130
CARDINAL
Parallelism, school of,
76
DATE
Paranoia,
532
CARDINAL
and projection,
238
CARDINAL
-
41
CARDINAL
Paris
GPE
, judgment of,
330-31 Pasche
TIME
,
F.
ORG
,
536
CARDINAL
n.
Passive
ORG
genesis,
380
CARDINAL
-82,
393
CARDINAL
,
425
CARDINAL
Passover, feast of,
246
CARDINAL
Pathology of desire (
Kantian
ORG
),
18586
DATE
,
448
CARDINAL
Pathology of duty (
Freudian
NORP
),
18586
DATE
,
448
CARDINAL
Paul
PERSON
,
Saint
GPE
,
202
CARDINAL
,
246
CARDINAL
,
449
CARDINAL
,
528
CARDINAL
Pelagius
ORG
,
14
CARDINAL
Penis,
511
CARDINAL
maternal, theory of,
172-73
CARDINAL
,
534
CARDINAL
Peri Hermeneias (Aristotle). See On
Interpretation (Aristotle) Perversion
ORG
and the neuroses,
486
PRODUCT
and sublimation,
484-86
CARDINAL
of sexual instincts,
194-96 Peters
PERCENT
,
Richard
PERSON
,
359
CARDINAL
n.,
362
CARDINAL
Phaedo
GPE
(Plato),
548
CARDINAL
Phenomenology,
Husserlian
GPE
,
3
CARDINAL
,
37582
DATE
Phenomenology of language,
383
CARDINAL
-86 Phenomenology of religion,
7
CARDINAL
,
14
DATE
,
28-29
DATE
,
54
DATE
,
153
CARDINAL
,
526
CARDINAL
and phenomenology of spirit, contrasted,
526
CARDINAL
-27 and psychoanalysis contrasted,
4243
DATE
verification in,
30
CARDINAL
Phenomenology of spirit,
Hegelian
PERSON
,
461
CARDINAL
-68,
474
CARDINAL
-75,
478
CARDINAL
,
498
CARDINAL
,
507
CARDINAL
,
511
CARDINAL
,
523
CARDINAL
,
525
CARDINAL
and phenomenology of the sacred, contrasted,
526
CARDINAL
-27 Phenomenology of
Spirit
ORG
,
The (Hegel)
ORG
,
317
CARDINAL
,
422
CARDINAL
,
461
CARDINAL
,
463
CARDINAL
-71,
478
CARDINAL
-79,
506
CARDINAL
Philebus (Plato),
323
CARDINAL
Philippe
PERSON
’s dream, analysis of,
400
CARDINAL
n.,
401
CARDINAL
n.,
405
CARDINAL
n.
Philosophy
ORG
and
Analysis
PERSON
(ed.
Macdonald
PERSON
),
360
CARDINAL
,
362
CARDINAL
Philosophy of Right
WORK_OF_ART
, The (
Hegel
PERSON
),
434
CARDINAL
,
509
CARDINAL
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
WORK_OF_ART
, The (Cassirer),
10
CARDINAL
Philp
PERSON
,
H. L.
PERSON
,
231
CARDINAL
n.
Phylogenesis
PERSON
,
179
CARDINAL
,
188
CARDINAL
,
190
CARDINAL
,
198
CARDINAL
,
233
CARDINAL
Physiology,
361
CARDINAL
Piaget
ORG
,
Jean
PERSON
,
365
CARDINAL
n.
Pictorial
DATE
representation,
94-96
CARDINAL
,
99100
DATE
,
102
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
-60,
398
CARDINAL
,
40001
DATE
,
404
CARDINAL
-05,
441 Picture
ORG
puzzle,
89
CARDINAL
n.
Piron
PERSON
,
H.
PERSON
,
367
CARDINAL
n.
Plato
PERSON
,
23
DATE
,
209
CARDINAL
,
312
CARDINAL
,
328
CARDINAL
,
386
PRODUCT
,
419
CARDINAL
,
428
CARDINAL
,
444
CARDINAL
,
452
CARDINAL
,
505
CARDINAL
n.,
509
CARDINAL
,
521
CARDINAL
,
548
CARDINAL
catharsis,
333
CARDINAL
dialectic of pleasure,
323
CARDINAL
Eros,
46
DATE
,
306
CARDINAL
,
536
CARDINAL
injustice,
546
CARDINAL
place of myth in philosophy,
41
CARDINAL
science (episteme),
41
CARDINAL
spiritedness (thumos),
506
CARDINAL
unity of poetry and love,
175
CARDINAL
Platonic
PRODUCT
tradition,
17
CARDINAL
,
18
CARDINAL
,
26
CARDINAL
Play,
520
CARDINAL
. See also
Fort-da
PERSON
example
and artistic creativity,
165
CARDINAL
,
333
CARDINAL
and mastery over absence,
285-86
CARDINAL
of children,
314
CARDINAL
,
316
CARDINAL
-17 Pleasure-ego,
126
CARDINAL
,
272
CARDINAL
,
274
CARDINAL
,
276
CARDINAL
,
316
CARDINAL
,
425
CARDINAL
Pleasure principle,
63
DATE
,
71
DATE
,
74
DATE
n.,
111
CARDINAL
-14,
144
CARDINAL
,
149
CARDINAL
,
180
CARDINAL
, 25657,
318-22
QUANTITY
and death instinct,
282
CARDINAL
-89,
319
CARDINAL
-20 and reality principle,
261
CARDINAL
-80,
33438
DATE
in
Hegelian
NORP
terms,
470
CARDINAL
Poetics of the will,
525
CARDINAL
Poetique de Vespace
ORG
,
La (Bache-lard
ORG
),
15
CARDINAL
-16 Political economy,
434
CARDINAL
Politzer
GPE
,
G.
PERSON
,
394
CARDINAL
,
436
CARDINAL
n.
Pontalis
PERSON
,
J. B.
PERSON
,
418
CARDINAL
n.,
498
CARDINAL
n.,
540
CARDINAL
n. Pope, the,
169
CARDINAL
Popper
ORG
,
Karl
PERSON
,
363
CARDINAL
Possession. See Having
Power
ORG
,
507
CARDINAL
-14,
523
CARDINAL
,
547
CARDINAL
. See also
Domination Powerful
PERSON
, the, 29
Prehistory
PERSON
,
195
CARDINAL
-96,
199
CARDINAL
,
205
CARDINAL
,
213
CARDINAL
,
224
CARDINAL
,
448
CARDINAL
“Preliminary Communication” (
Breu
PERSON
-er and
Freud
ORG
),
83
DATE
Pre-Socratics
PRODUCT
,
256
CARDINAL
,
312
CARDINAL
Primal father. See also Primal scene and
Greek
NORP
tragedy,
209
CARDINAL
n. as eschaton, 543
and genetic explanation,
179
CARDINAL
,
18688
DATE
,
191
CARDINAL
,
198
CARDINAL
-99
by analogy with the theory of dreams and the neuroses,
153
CARDINAL
-56,
159
CARDINAL
-78,
199
CARDINAL
,
201
CARDINAL
-02,
208
CARDINAL
,
231
CARDINAL
,
252
CARDINAL
-54,
258
CARDINAL
,
31112
DATE
limits of,
153-55
DATE
,
176
CARDINAL
“Psychoanalytic
Notes
PRODUCT
on an Autobiographical Account of
a Case of Paranoia
WORK_OF_ART
(
Dementia Paranoides
PERSON
)” (
Freud
ORG
),
238
CARDINAL
n.
Psychoanalytic
ORG
technique,
390-96
CARDINAL
passim,
406
CARDINAL
-18,
456
CARDINAL
Psychology of personality,
462
CARDINAL
n.
Psychosis
GPE
,
81
CARDINAL
n.,
263
CARDINAL
,
269
CARDINAL
Psychosynthesis
GPE
,
460
FAC
,
472
CARDINAL
“
Psychotherapy
GPE
, On” (
Freud
ORG
),
411
CARDINAL
Pumpian
NORP
-Mindlin,
E.
GPE
,
347
CARDINAL
n.
Quality
ORG
,
76-78
DATE
,
80
DATE
,
110
CARDINAL
,
123
CARDINAL
,
266
CARDINAL
Quantification in psychoanalysis,
365
CARDINAL
n.
Quantitative
ORG
hypothesis,
69
CARDINAL
,
70
DATE
,
73
DATE
,
86
DATE
,
123
CARDINAL
,
255
CARDINAL
-57
Quota
GPE
of affect,
143
CARDINAL
-45,
149
CARDINAL
, 435
Racamier
PERSON
,
P. C.
PERSON
,
498
CARDINAL
n.
Rank
PERSON
,
Otto
PERSON
,
100
CARDINAL
n.,
217
CARDINAL
,
245
CARDINAL
,
500
CARDINAL
,
502
CARDINAL
n„
540
CARDINAL
Rapaport
GPE
,
David
PERSON
,
347
CARDINAL
n.,
348
CARDINAL
,
and negation,
315-17
CARDINAL
in mourning,
130
CARDINAL
not identical with adaptation,
371
CARDINAL
Reappropriation of consciousness,
43-48
CARDINAL
passim,
52-53
CARDINAL
,
55
DATE
,
116
CARDINAL
n.,
429
CARDINAL
,
495
CARDINAL
. See also
Becoming
ORG
conscious, process of;
Insight
ORG
, achieving of
Recollection
GPE
of meaning.
See Interpretation
ORG
, as restoration of meaning
Reconciliation
PRODUCT
and the sacred,
527
CARDINAL
-28,
540
CARDINAL
with primal father,
242
CARDINAL
,
246
CARDINAL
Redemption,
548
CARDINAL
Reduction, phenomenological,
121
CARDINAL
,
376
CARDINAL
-77,
383
CARDINAL
,
389
CARDINAL
-90,
421
CARDINAL
Reductive hermeneutics.
See Interpretation
ORG
, as demystification of illusions
Reduplication
PRODUCT
of consciousness,
63
DATE
,
186
CARDINAL
,
466-83
CARDINAL
passim,
518
CARDINAL
,
523
CARDINAL
“
Reflexions
ORG
sur une problematique husserlienne” (
De Wael-hens
PERSON
),
388
CARDINAL
and historical and collective
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex,
233
CARDINAL
,
236
CARDINAL
,
24247
DATE
,
253
CARDINAL
-54
and individual
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex,
233
CARDINAL
,
235
CARDINAL
,
241
CARDINAL
-42 and pleasure principle,
275
CARDINAL
as repetition of the past,
534
CARDINAL
,
53738
DATE
as universal neurosis of mankind,
231
CARDINAL
-33,
240
CARDINAL
n„
248
CARDINAL
,
253
CARDINAL
,
326
CARDINAL
,
447
CARDINAL
,
532
CARDINAL
-34 as wish-fulfillment,
252
CARDINAL
-53 comparative history of,
3
CARDINAL
Freud
ORG
’s interpretation and critique of,
107
CARDINAL
n„
230
CARDINAL
-54,
325
CARDINAL
-28,
446
CARDINAL
-47,
529
CARDINAL
-39,
544
CARDINAL
-45, 54951
“Platonism for the people,”
WORK_OF_ART
33
CARDINAL
son religion,
242
CARDINAL
-43,
535
CARDINAL
Religion of the Semites (Smith
ORG
),
206
CARDINAL
“Remarques sur la fonction du language dans la decouverte freudienne
” (Benveniste),
396, 397 n.
“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (Freud),
WORK_OF_ART
412
CARDINAL
Renaissance
PERSON
,
25
CARDINAL
Renaissance
ORG
philosophy,
262
CARDINAL
Representability.
ORG
See Pictorial representation
Representatives
ORG
(psychical) of instincts,
115-16
CARDINAL
,
134-50
CARDINAL
,
154
CARDINAL
,
174
CARDINAL
,
257
CARDINAL
,
271
CARDINAL
,
370
CARDINAL
,
393
CARDINAL
,
395
CARDINAL
,
398
CARDINAL
,
400
CARDINAL
,
429
CARDINAL
,
455-57
CARDINAL
affects,
135
CARDINAL
,
137
CARDINAL
-38,
142-50
CARDINAL
,
453 empirical realism
QUANTITY
of,
432-35
CARDINAL
,
438
CARDINAL
ideas,
135
CARDINAL
,
137
CARDINAL
-38,
142-50, 42930
DATE
of death instinct,
281
CARDINAL
,
286
CARDINAL
,
29397
DATE
,
305
CARDINAL
-08,
313
CARDINAL
-14,
317
CARDINAL
-18
Repression
PRODUCT
,
6
DATE
,
85
DATE
,
110
DATE
,
112-13
DATE
,
13742
DATE
,
144
CARDINAL
-46,
180-81
DATE
,
196
CARDINAL
n„
356
CARDINAL
-57,
392
CARDINAL
and authority,
178
CARDINAL
and idealization,
214
CARDINAL
and sublimation,
171
CARDINAL
-72,
486
CARDINAL
-87 and symbolism,
502
CARDINAL
n. as metaphor,
396
CARDINAL
,
401
CARDINAL
-03 defined,
77
CARDINAL
,
135
CARDINAL
,
139
CARDINAL
n. origin of term,
72
CARDINAL
“Repression” (
Freud
ORG
),
138
CARDINAL
,
141
CARDINAL
n.,
142
CARDINAL
n„
143
CARDINAL
-44,
147
CARDINAL
,
453
CARDINAL
Republic, The (Plato),
209
CARDINAL
,
506
CARDINAL
Reservoir
ORG
of instincts. See Narcissism, primary
Resignation
PERSON
to death,
325
CARDINAL
,
329
CARDINAL
-32,
336
CARDINAL
-38
Resistance,
85
DATE
,
140
CARDINAL
n.,
356
CARDINAL
struggle against,
407
CARDINAL
-08,
410
CARDINAL
-17 Restlessness of life,
465
CARDINAL
,
467
CARDINAL
Restorative hermeneutics.
See Interpretation
ORG
, as restoration of meaning
Ricoeur
PERSON
,
Paul
PERSON
,
506
CARDINAL
n.,
524
CARDINAL
n.,
525
CARDINAL
n.
Rieff
PERSON
,
Philip
PERSON
, xii,
462
CARDINAL
n.
Robert
PERSON
,
Marthe
PERSON
,
462 n.
Rousseau
TIME
,
Jean Jacques
PERSON
,
211
CARDINAL
Ryle
GPE
,
Gilbert
GPE
,
353
CARDINAL
,
362
CARDINAL
n.
Sachs
ORG
,
H.
ORG
,
502
CARDINAL
n.
Sacred
PERSON
,
the 7-8
PRODUCT
,
26
DATE
,
29
DATE
,
32
DATE
,
55
DATE
,
60
DATE
,
153
CARDINAL
,
520
CARDINAL
. See also
Faith
PERSON
; Phenomenology of religion ambiguity of,
529
CARDINAL
-31 and symbolism,
13
CARDINAL
-14,
31
DATE
,
543
CARDINAL
-44 as horizon of reflection,
526
CARDINAL
,
52831
DATE
as reconciliation,
527
CARDINAL
-28 Sacrifice at the altar,
206
CARDINAL
Sadism,
124
CARDINAL
-25,
137
CARDINAL
,
228
CARDINAL
,
475
CARDINAL
and death instinct,
295
CARDINAL
,
298-302
CARDINAL
different meanings of,
295
CARDINAL
Sartre
ORG
,
Jean Paul
PERSON
,
436
CARDINAL
n.
Satin Slipper
PERSON
, The (
Claudel
PERSON
),
528
CARDINAL
Satisfaction,
78
DATE
,
322
CARDINAL
art as substitute satisfaction,
163
CARDINAL
,
333
CARDINAL
-35
Saussure,
Ferdinand de
PERSON
,
12
CARDINAL
,
397
CARDINAL
Schelling
GPE
,
Friedrich
GPE
,
537
CARDINAL
Schemer, K. A.
ORG
,
89
DATE
n.,
98-99
DATE
,
101
CARDINAL
,
499
CARDINAL
Secondary
ORDINAL
revision,
111
CARDINAL
,
159
CARDINAL
,
241
CARDINAL
Seduction of child by adult,
81, 9596
DATE
,
106
CARDINAL
-07,
113
CARDINAL
,
161
CARDINAL
,
537
CARDINAL
-38 as screen memory of
Oedipus
PRODUCT
complex,
107
CARDINAL
n.,
188
CARDINAL
-89
Sein
PERSON
und
Zeit
PERSON
(
Heidegger
PERSON
),
33
CARDINAL
Self-appropriation. See Reappropriation of consciousness Self-preservative instincts,
124
CARDINAL
,
127
CARDINAL
,
283
CARDINAL
,
290
CARDINAL
,
293
CARDINAL
n.,
308
CARDINAL
-09. See also
Ego-instincts
PERSON
Sellin
PRODUCT
, E„
245
CARDINAL
Semantics of desire,
5
CARDINAL
-7,
160
CARDINAL
,
255
CARDINAL
,
271
CARDINAL
,
294
CARDINAL
,
322
CARDINAL
,
363
CARDINAL
,
375
CARDINAL
,
381
CARDINAL
. See also
Psychoanalytic
NORP
discourse, mixed structure of and illusion,
234
CARDINAL
and intersubjectivity,
386
CARDINAL
Servile
GPE
will,
14
CARDINAL
,
18
CARDINAL
Sexual etiology of the neuroses,
83
DATE
,
85
CARDINAL
Sexual instincts,
84
CARDINAL
,
124
CARDINAL
,
181
CARDINAL
,
261
CARDINAL
,
271
CARDINAL
-72,
291-93
DATE
,
475
CARDINAL
. See also
Eros
PERSON
;
Libido
GPE
and perversion,
194
CARDINAL
-96 and sublimation,
194
CARDINAL
Sexuality,
271
CARDINAL
,
295
CARDINAL
,
357
CARDINAL
and institutionalization,
196
CARDINAL
-304
and prohibition of incest,
200
CARDINAL
and repression,
171
CARDINAL
-72 and sublimation,
484
CARDINAL
-86 and symbolism,
160
CARDINAL
,
499
CARDINAL
-502,
503
CARDINAL
n.
DATE
divinization of,
535
CARDINAL
human meaning of,
382-83
CARDINAL
infantile,
192-96
CARDINAL
,
197
CARDINAL
n..
484-85
CARDINAL
in opposition to death,
291
CARDINAL
-93,
295
CARDINAL
of cells,
320
CARDINAL
psychical aspect of,
84
CARDINAL
psychoanalytic concept of,
410
CARDINAL
n. stages of,
194-96
CARDINAL
,
284
CARDINAL
Shakespeare
PERSON
,
William
PERSON
,
5
CARDINAL
,
163
CARDINAL
,
329
CARDINAL
,
331
CARDINAL
,
332
CARDINAL
,
521
CARDINAL
Sign
and symbol contrasted,
11
CARDINAL
-13,
3031
DATE
,
49
DATE
relation to id,
222
CARDINAL
,
225
CARDINAL
-27,
278
CARDINAL
,
298
CARDINAL
-300, 448-50,
489
CARDINAL
relation to reality,
278
CARDINAL
unconscious portions of,
183
CARDINAL
Superstition
PERSON
,
241
CARDINAL
. See also
Animism
ORG
;
Magic
Surrealism
PRODUCT
,
522
CARDINAL
Symbol(s
WORK_OF_ART
). See also
Symbolism
PRODUCT
and analogy,
17-19
DATE
,
24
CARDINAL
,
30-31
DATE
,
41
CARDINAL
and art,
175
CARDINAL
and idols contrasted,
27
CARDINAL
,
551
CARDINAL
and language,
7
CARDINAL
,
12-19
CARDINAL
passim,
2930
DATE
and negativity,
314
CARDINAL
and philosophical reflection, xii,
38-49
DATE
,
53
DATE
and reality,
10
DATE
,
49
DATE
and sign contrasted,
11-13
DATE
,
30-31
DATE
,
49
CARDINAL
Aristotle
ORG
’s notion of,
21
CARDINAL
n.
Cassirer
ORG
’s notion of,
10-11
CARDINAL
correlative to interpretation,
6
CARDINAL
-9,
18-19
DATE
,
41-42
QUANTITY
Symbolic
PERSON
logic,
9
CARDINAL
,
19
DATE
, 48-54 Symbolism,
520
CARDINAL
-22. See also
Symbol
ORG
and compulsion to repeat,
286
CARDINAL
and sublimation,
497
CARDINAL
-98,
505
CARDINAL
n. in dreams,
15
CARDINAL
,
99-102
CARDINAL
,
498
CARDINAL
-502,
505
CARDINAL
in poetic imagination,
15-16
CARDINAL
of evil,
13
CARDINAL
,
17
CARDINAL
,
38-40
DATE
,
526
CARDINAL
-27,
547-48
QUANTITY
of salvation,
39
CARDINAL
-40,
548
CARDINAL
of the pure and the impure,
13
CARDINAL
,
19
DATE
,
29
DATE
,
38-39
DATE
of the servile will,
13
CARDINAL
-14,
18
CARDINAL
religious,
7
CARDINAL
,
14-15
DATE
,
28
DATE
,
520
CARDINAL
,
524
CARDINAL
,
527
CARDINAL
-29,
540
CARDINAL
,
542
CARDINAL
-43,
551
CARDINAL
sexual,
160
CARDINAL
,
499
CARDINAL
-502,
503
CARDINAL
n. spheres of,
504
CARDINAL
,
506
CARDINAL
-14 Symbolism of Evil, The (
Ricoeur
ORG
), xii,
28
DATE
,
37
DATE
,
47
DATE
Symposium (Plato
EVENT
),
306
CARDINAL
,
312
CARDINAL
,
337
CARDINAL
,
521
CARDINAL
Taboo
PERSON
,
198
CARDINAL
-206, 449
Temptation, psychology of,
202
CARDINAL
Thanatos,
35
CARDINAL
,
63
DATE
,
157
CARDINAL
,
256
CARDINAL
,
258
CARDINAL
,
291
CARDINAL
-92,
302
CARDINAL
-09,
338
CARDINAL
. See also Death instinct
Theme
PERSON
of
the Three Caskets
ORG
,
The (Freud
GPE
),
330
CARDINAL
-32
Theologico-Political Treatise (Spinoza
PERSON
),
25
CARDINAL
,
527
CARDINAL
“
Theory of Symbolism
WORK_OF_ART
, The” (
Jones
PERSON
),
502
CARDINAL
n.
Thing-presentation
PERSON
,
398
CARDINAL
,
401
CARDINAL
,
404
CARDINAL
Third
ORDINAL
woman, the, as symbol of death,
330
CARDINAL
-32
“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (
Freud
ORG
),
329-30
MONEY
Three
CARDINAL
Essays
ORG
on
the Theory of Sexuality (Freud)
ORG
,
84
DATE
,
191
CARDINAL
-200
Totem
GPE
meal,
206-10
CARDINAL
passim,
534-35
CARDINAL
origin of society, morality, and religion,
210
CARDINAL
,
242
CARDINAL
Toulmin
PERSON
,
Stephen
PERSON
,
359
CARDINAL
,
360
CARDINAL
n.,
363
CARDINAL
Traite d’histoire
ORG
generale des religions (Eliade),
30
CARDINAL
Transcendental
PERSON
idealism,
432
CARDINAL
Transcendental
GPE
logic,
48
CARDINAL
,
52
CARDINAL
Transcendental
PRODUCT
method,
Kantian
PERSON
,
10
CARDINAL
, 11
Transference,
85
DATE
,
372
CARDINAL
,
389
CARDINAL
-90, 41317,
438
CARDINAL
-39,
474
CARDINAL
-75 Translation rules,
357
CARDINAL
Transposition. See
Distortion Traumatic
NORP
neurosis,
285
CARDINAL
-86,
288
CARDINAL
Traumdeutung
GPE
(Freud). See
The Interpretation of Dreams
WORK_OF_ART
(
Freud
ORG
)
Tremendum
PERSON
numinosum,
29
CARDINAL
True discourse, aim of psychoanalysis,
373
CARDINAL
,
390
CARDINAL
Truth
ORG
, resisted by narcissism,
42627
DATE
Unconscious
ORG
, in descriptive sense,
117-21
Unconscious
PERCENT
, the
ORG
and spirit contrasted,
468
CARDINAL
and the id,
182-83
CARDINAL
,
221
CARDINAL
n. as a system (
Ucs
GPE
.),
117-21
DATE
,
134
CARDINAL
,
141
CARDINAL
-42,
146
CARDINAL
,
392
CARDINAL
-93,
424
CARDINAL
as psychical,
138
CARDINAL
and reality,
324
CARDINAL
,
327
CARDINAL
and the pleasurable,
274
CARDINAL
Valabrega
PERSON
,
J. P.
PERSON
,
407
CARDINAL
n.
Valuation,
507-10
CARDINAL
,
523
CARDINAL
,
547
CARDINAL
Value, in
Nietzsche
ORG
,
34
CARDINAL
Van der
Leeuw
GPE
. See
Leeuw
GPE
,
Geradus van der
PERSON
Van Gogh
PERSON
.
See Gogh
PERSON
,
Vincent van Vergote
PERSON
,
A.
PERSON
,
367
CARDINAL
n.,
379
CARDINAL
n.,
382
CARDINAL
n.,
390
CARDINAL
n„
395
CARDINAL
n„
480
CARDINAL
n.,
536
CARDINAL
n. Verification
Waelhens
PRODUCT
, Alphonse de,
376
CARDINAL
,
379
CARDINAL
,
382
CARDINAL
n.,
383
CARDINAL
n.,
385
CARDINAL
,
387
CARDINAL
n.,
388
CARDINAL
,
390
CARDINAL
n„
395
CARDINAL
War
ORG
,
329
CARDINAL
Weber,
Max
PERSON
,
374
CARDINAL
Weismann
ORG
,
August
DATE
,
291
CARDINAL
n.,
312
CARDINAL
Wernicke,
Karl
ORG
,
83
DATE
n.
DATE
Wholly Other, the,
525
CARDINAL
-26,
529
CARDINAL
-31
Why War
EVENT
? (
Freud
ORG
),
191
CARDINAL
“
‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis”
WORK_OF_ART
(
Freud
ORG
),
410
CARDINAL
Will to power,
26
CARDINAL
,
34-36
DATE
,
55
DATE
,
313
CARDINAL
n.
Wish
NORP
-fulfillment and illusion,
234
CARDINAL
and meaning,
368
CARDINAL
and regression,
266
CARDINAL
-67,
441
CARDINAL
as model in interpretation of culture,
155
CARDINAL
,
160
CARDINAL
fantasy as,
166
CARDINAL
in dreams,
87
CARDINAL
,
90
CARDINAL
-92,
103
CARDINAL
-04,
10809
DATE
,
159
CARDINAL
,
263
CARDINAL
religion as,
252
CARDINAL
-53 Wittgenstein,
Ludwig
ORG
,
3
CARDINAL
,
37
CARDINAL
Word
PRODUCT
-presentation,
398
CARDINAL
,
401
CARDINAL
World
ORG
as Will and
Idea
PERSON
, The (
Schopenhauer
NORP
),
454
CARDINAL
Worth. See
Valuation Wundt
PERSON
,
Wilhelm
PERSON
,
202
CARDINAL
n.,
205
CARDINAL
-07,
218
CARDINAL
Yahweh
GPE
,
245
CARDINAL
Zurich
GPE
school of psychoanalysis,
202
CARDINAL
n.
GPE